Decade Dance
by William Easley
Summary: April, 2016, and just as Dipper and Mabel are ready to go to Gravity Falls for the occasion of Wendy's Senior Prom, a future old enemy pops up to force a change of plans.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note: This one is inspired by fellow GF fan retro mania, who wanted a story of time travel through different decades. It also ties in with my first GF fanfic, "Baby, Baby." Let's hope it goes well! Updates may take more time than usual—I have research to do…._

* * *

 **Decades Dance**

 **(April 7, 2016-July 4, 1883-September 1, 2012-April 7, 2016. Yes, it's one of THOSE.)**

* * *

 **1: A Future Old Enemy**

The week leading up to spring break left Dipper in knots of anguish. He'd agreed to be Wendy's date to her Senior Prom—Mom had come around at last, after lots of persuading from him, Mabel, Dad, Grunkle Stan, and Grunkle Ford. "But she's so much older than you!" Mom had said.

Dad, lifting a crafty eyebrow and glancing at her with a squint that made him look like Mabel planning some mischief, said, "Two years and a bit, that's not much. And I know a couple—"

"Oh, I suppose it will be all right," Mom said. Dipper had a hard time keeping his grin to himself. Though Mom didn't know that he knew, he knew that she was two years and a bit older than Dad, who knew and told Dipper so he'd know. You know?

Anyway, Mrs. Pines had warmed toward Wendy since the fall, when for a while it looked as if the twins were never going to Gravity Falls again—well, until they were eighteen and more or less on their own, anyhow. Dipper didn't know how it had happened, but somehow Mom had got over her initial fury at seeing a revealing photo—him lying in bed, apparently passed out, a few beer bottles around the pillow, and four, count 'em, four girls in nighties cuddled close to him, and one of them was Wendy.

It had been a Mabel trick, but for a bit there it was touch and go, and it even caused friction between Mabel and Dipper—mainly because she said he was too nice, willing to forgive and forget when she was miserable and really wanted to be yelled at. Anyhow, it had blown over enough for the twins to have some time in Gravity Falls after Christmas. Now they were on the downslope toward June and summer vacation, and Mom and Dad had already said they could spend the summer up in Oregon again.

Dipper felt pretty good when school ended that Thursday. He was antsy about the dancing part—being Wendy's date meant they had to dance at the prom—but he and Wendy didn't make a bad pair on the dance floor these days, not when he was very close to her in height and she always wore flats to the dances. Though he wouldn't kid himself about being the best dancer, or even a good one, Mabel had loosened him up to the point where he didn't care if people laughed—he had fun out on the floor with his Lumberjack Girl.

Mabel was hyper (what else is new?) because she was going to see Teek. And Mom and Dad were even going along—though talking Dad into taking a couple of days off work was about as hard as Dipper's last sprint had been (he won, by an eyelash. He was having a good year on the Varsity track team. But that had been a hard-run race).

"We gonna do it? Mabel asked, falling into step with him as they left the school.

"I don't know," Dipper said. "This could get us in big trouble."

Mabel blew a raspberry— _Phbbbbt!_ "Come on, Dip—it's, what, two miles! And when have we ever seen a traffic patrol on the way home? Gotta be a first time. And anyhow, we're not breaking the law in Oregon!"

"But you're driving in California!" Dipper said.

"But if I was driving in Oregon, I'd be street-legal," Mabel said with that unerring logic that drove Dipper crazy. "Up there, you just gotta be sixteen and a half before you can drive with someone under twenty in the car, with no adult present!"

"But we live in California," Dipper pointed out. "I don't know. I'd better catch the bus."

"Too late!" Mabel crowed. "There it goes!"

"Then I can walk home."

"Dipper," Mabel wheedled. "C'mon. What would Wendy say? This is what makes it fun, dork!"

"If we get busted, it's your butt," Dipper grumbled. They had reached the vibrantly chartreuse Helen Wheels, the car that—in theory—belonged to both of them, though Mabel drove it far more often. "OK, get in the car and hunker down until we're on the way. Lower! Take off the trapper's hat, they'll think I'm chauffeuring a beaver! Lower, Dipper! Here we go. Nice and easy—"

"You don't have to hide," said someone from the back seat.

"Yikes!" Mabel yelled. "It's not my fault, Officer! My twin told me he was 21!"

"I'm not an officer," the voice said. "Not a police officer. Don't you know me?"

Mabel hadn't put the car in gear. Both she and Dipper swiveled to look into the back seat. An adult sat there, a pale man with a square jaw and a strange haircut, like Moe in the old Three Stooges films. Except his hair was in color, not black and white—a dark blond. He did look familiar—

"Who are you?" Mabel asked.

"You should know me—Gam-gam!"

"Oh, my God, Lolph!" Dipper said. "Look, we haven't done anything—"

"Yes, you have," the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron agent said. "In 2012, just after the Time Baby's encounter with Bill Cipher."

"Oh, that," Mabel said. "It ended good! You guys didn't get all dustified and junk!"

"Yes, but it has come to our attention that Blendin Blandin, who was instrumental in getting you involved in that, is missing! He's off on a different time line, and we must bring him back, so he will have already done what he did in 2012 but he hasn't done yet!"

"I hate this stuff," Dipper complained. "Look I can give you a clue. Blendin's hiding out in the Old West in the year 1883. He's scared of you guys—I know 'cause he wrote a letter to us in code. I pasted it in Journal Three after I finally managed to break the cipher—"

"We know that," Lolph said. "But we can't get to him."

"Why not?" Mabel asked. "You got your tape-time-measurey things—"

"Blendin cluttered the time-path," Lolph said. "He deliberately introduced anachronisms between now and then. They have to be located, collected, and taken with you so the time-lock on the year 1883 can be unlocked and you can persuade Blendin to go back to 2012. That done, you can return to this very moment. I'll even ride home with you so that terrible police chase and fiery crash won't will have happened, and you'll both survive."

"Sounds reasonable," Mabel said.

"Wait, what?" Dipper squeaked. "And also, uh—why us?"

"Because Blendin won't trust us yet. Once you return him to 2012, and explain to him that he must will to be is locating you two—your younger selves—on the bus homeward and persuade you to have help him keep Cipher from disintegrating the squad and Time Baby, then the time-track will be on the right time-track this time."

"Verbs," Dipper groaned. "Verbs and the word 'time.' That's why I hate—what fiery crash?"

"Averted," Lolph said. "Since I am here, Mabel will not have to try to outrun six police cruisers."

"That's a relief," Mabel said. "I could lose my license!"

"But if Blendin won't come—"

"He will because he did already once in the future past," Lolph said. "Anyway, you can take him a message from the TPAES: All is forgiven. We need your help."

"Our help?" Mabel asked.

"Blendin's help," Lolph said.

"God help you," Mabel said.

"That, too," Lolph said. "I am going to take us out of the time-stream so we won't have to discuss this while sitting in a parked car in a high-school lot. Prepare yourselves!"

Dipper grabbed the armrest. "For—

* * *

"—what?" he asked. "What just happened? And where are we? And why do I feel like throwing up?"

"And _when_ are we?" Mabel added, patting out a minor fire in Dipper's hair. "I don't think we're in Kansas."

"Actually," Lolph said, "we are. Kansas in approximately 10,000 BC. This is, in fact, the site where one day Blendin Blandin will have been blending into the Old West, except it's the not-yet West. There aren't any people here yet."

But there were bison, who went past in an unending parade. "Cows!" Mabel said. "Yay!"

Dipper rubbed his eyes. "OK," he said. "Tell us what you want us to do. Let's consider it."

"Then listen."

* * *

Time paradox avoidance isn't just a matter of picking up the odd calculator or shoe with blinky lights and returning it to the proper era. That's part of it, but not all. A larger part is to pick up the item, whatever it might be, not after, but before someone really notices it. That fine-tuning is difficult. Sometimes the agents misjudge, and when they do, someone's in for a memory-wiping, a tricky business. A small misstep and a subject of memory-wiping could wind up living in a junkyard and married to a raccoon.

"Blendin cleverly concealed anomalies in thirteen places," Lolph said. "Each one is like a non-time time bomb. If discovered, it derails the entire future! And only someone who can both collect all thirteen anomalies and also deliver them to Blendin in 1883 can follow the trail and not get sidetimed on a completely different time-line. That's where you two come in. We know you're smart and resourceful."

"Thank you!" Mabel said. "Dipper helps, too."

"Uh—yes—and we'll give you better than state-of-the-art equipment. It may take you weeks—"

"We don't have weeks!" Dipper objected. "I've got to take Wendy to her senior prom on Saturday night!"

"The weeks will be subjective," Lolph said. "Once you retrieve Blendin and set him on the correct 2012 time-line, I will return you to the exact moment in the school parking lot when Mabel was about to ignite the starter for the hydrocarbon-fueled transport—what is it called?"

"Helen Wheels," Mabel said. "I thought that up myself."

"Car," Dipper said more prosaically.

"Car, yes! I can't promise a time-wish for you two, but I will say this: If the time-line unravels for lack of Blendin's work in 2012, then Bill Cipher will have conquered the world in the past and you will be displaced in time. And Time Baby will be has been already to have been killed! For realsies!"

"Sounds . . . hilarious but serious," Dipper said. "Mabel?"

"What, are you asking should we go for it? Of course, we go for it!" Mabel said. "Mystery Twins!"

They did the fist-bump. Lolph sighed and smiled. He looked different without his TPAES uniform and equipment—no range-finding multi-dimensional scope over his left eye, and he was dressed in what appeared to be a zoot suit and ice skates—and he definitely looked friendlier than the twins had ever seen him before. "That's my gam-gam and my favorite ancient uncle!" he said.

"For true?" Mabel asked. "I was just conning you, you know."

"I had a genetic test run," Lolph said. "You're in there somewhere."

"Huh. Go figure," Mabel said. "I wonder who the lucky great-fourteen-times grandpop is going to have will have been?"

"Please," Dipper pleaded. "Just stop."

* * *

They pulled on coveralls over their street clothes. "These are holoprojectors," Lolph said. "About five generations advanced over the ones we wear. They automatically detect the era and place and project an image of a suitable costume for you. That way you can truly blend in with the populace. The eyeglasses are detectors that will help you locate anomalies. We don't know what they are, except they all must be small, because Blendin carried them all with him. You'll each have a carrying pouch—a briefcase for Dipper, a large purse for Mabel—"

"Sexist," Mabel grumbled.

"It's a Hermes in burgundy," Lolph said.

"Mabel like!"

The time tapes had been upgraded, too—now they were more like small calculators. No, more like small mp3 players from approximately 2005—each had a round dial and two buttons, nothing marked. "How do we know what does what?" Dipper asked.

"Press the large round button once, and the eyeglasses give you a display. The other two zero in on an exact date and a location. Then you're on your own—the anomaly, whatever it is, will be within ten meters of you—"

"Thirty-five feet," Mabel explained.

"Thirty-two and a bit," Dipper corrected.

"Thirty-two and a bit IS within thirty-five, Brobro!"

"And the first one is in Gravity Falls," Lolph said. "We think Blendin left about one per decade. We're depending on you two. Are you ready to go?"

"No!" Dipper said.

"Too late," Lolph said. The air turned blue, and everything, the car, the endless plain, the herd of bison, and a whole lot of bison droppings, all just went away.


	2. Chapter 2

**2: In No Time**

 **(2012)**

* * *

 _In a nondescript and rather shabby warehouse in between time and eternity._

"How did it time-go?" asked Dundgren.

Lolph, who had stripped to his skivvies and was donning his TPAES uniform, said, "I hope I impressed the Pines twins with the gravity of the situation."

"I still think Blendin should've been fired a long time ago. Out of a cannon, preferably."

"We need him. You know what the Doctor said—he could foresee a million possible time-lines, and only in the one that Blendin will is going to has taken the twelve-year-old twins from the bus will the Earth survive without spinning into chaos. And since we are human—mostly human—"

"I know," Dundgren said. "We depend on the Earth's survival so we don't fade from existence. You don't need to explain that to me as though we had an audience who needed exposition."

"Are the time-barriers still holding?"

"For the time-time being. We shouldn't have thought we could hang on through Time Baby's glacier nap. Only nobody wanted Blendin back. You know if the twins don't succeed in this time-quest, we won't have another chance. The time-portal possibilities are rapidly sealing—"

"I know all that!" Lolph said. "But wait. Who told _you_?"

"The Doctor."

"Strange."

* * *

"Whoa!" Dipper said. "You know when we are?"

"I know _where_ we are," Mabel said. "There's the Shack! Only it looks kinda beat up. And way small. And Waddles's sty—"

"Hasn't been built yet, Mabel," Dipper said. "We're somewhere during Weirdmageddon! I mean, look up at the orange sky! Doesn't that tell you something?"

Mabel looked decidedly grumpy. "My great-great-something-grandson sent us back into the middle of that mess and didn't _warn_ us?" Mabel said. "Oh, I'm gonna give him _such_ a time out. Whoa, Dip, look at us. Brobro, we're all raggedy!"

True—the twin teens wore similar outfits, tattered jeans spattered with oil, mud, and maybe worse stuff, ripped and stained shirts with missing buttons hanging open over stained tee shirts, and ski caps with holes that let their hair bristle out in clumps. "Must be the holoprojectors," he said. "I guess this will make us blend in with the refugees."

"Should we check out the Shack?" Mabel started forward.

Dipper grabbed her arm, holding her back. "No! Definitely not!" Dipper struggled to find the words. "We shouldn't even _be_ here. We could screw up the whole time-line if we got caught. And think about this: if Grunkle Stan sees us like this—sixteen years old—it's gonna make him freak. Or anybody else we know—"

"Here comes somebody!" Mabel said."Hide!"

The light was bad, maybe fortunately. The orange sky glared down, making colors weird and muted. The twins crouched in some bushes, holding their breath, as a tall figure and a shorter one came hurrying up to the Shack. The tall one carried a baseball bat in his right fist, and the shorter one clutched his left hand—

"OMG!" Mabel said in Dipper's ear. "It's Pacifica!"

Dipper blinked. "She looks so pathetic—cute, but pathetic!"

"My parents," Pacifica was pleading in a broken voice. "Dad's face was all messed up—horrible—and then the bat-things came and took him and Mom—and, and they almost got me—"

"We'll look for your parents when we can," Stan said gruffly.

"Wow," Dipper whispered. "He looked so much older back then!"

Pacifica, wearing a roughly-made garment sewn from a potato sack—and barefoot, her legs and feet striped with bloody scratches, her dirty hair straggly and tangled—wailed, "I'm so scared!"

Stan paused on the porch and sat down on the step. He gave the twelve-year-old Pacifica a reassuring hug. "I'm worried, too," he growled. "That triangle guy has Dipper and Mabel somewheres, too, and my brother. But my brother fixed up the Shack so nothin' bad can get in. You'll be safe here for a while, anyways. Gotta warn you, though—there's some monsters, I guess you'd call 'em, sheltering with us, too. They ain't so bad, though, not compared to that yellow nacho-chip freak. Come on, Pacifica, chin up. You're a Northwest, remember. You gotta be tough."

Pacifica wiped her eyes with her forearm. "Mr. Pines, I'm so sorry for all the mean things—"

"Ah, forget it," Stan said. "I like gals with spunk! Come on in and meet the gang. And brace yourself!"

"Stan's really a great guy," Dipper said. "Sometimes I forget."

"I wish I could hug Pacifica," Mabel murmured. "She looks so miserable."

"We couldn't let her see us," Dipper reminded her. "Come on—we have to find out just when this is, what day of Weirdmageddon."

They made their way toward town, dodging among the woods beside the road, then ducking from one place of cover to the next. They glimpsed the Falls—turned red as blood, and pouring up into the sky—and kept having to take cover as winged eyeballs flew overhead. "This is so _sick_!" Mabel said. "I'm so mad at Bill Cipher right now!"

"No," Dipper said, gazing into the distance. "In fact, you're not. Right now I think you're pretty happy. Look over there!" He pointed.

"What am I looking at?" Mabel asked, shading her eyes.

"Between the cliffs, see?"

"That big pink ball thingy—oh, wait!" She slapped her forehead. "Mabel Land! I must be in there. I was so childish!"

"OK," Dipper said, "We busted you out on the fourth day of Weirdmageddon—"

"I was in there for like a week!"

"I think time passed at a different rate inside the bubble. Anyway, as I was saying, we busted you out—"

"Sorry to contradict you, Brobro, but if I remember correctly, and I always do, I busted _you_ guys out. On the back of Waddles the Great!"

Beginning to sound a little annoyed, Dipper said, "Whatever—shh! Hide! Quick, get down!"

The twins dropped to their stomachs in a fortunately dry and overgrown ditch, peering out through dry, dead weeds. From the street came a strange sound of friction, as though a heavy bag of wet cement was being shoved along the pavement. A grating, deeply annoyed male voice was saying, "Come on, somebody, just get into my mouth! Is that such a hard thing to do?"

Something bulky and sweaty hauled itself past—a scowling giant head attached at the crown to a muscular arm, which reached out, gripped the earth, and dragged the monster along. It was heading toward—

"The mall!" Dipper said. "It's chasing someone—oh, no, that's me!"

The twins saw the sweaty head thing creeping toward a fleeing boy—Dipper, but twelve years old. "Aw, you were a cute little kid!" Mabel whispered.

Dipper closed his eyes, feeling a sharp and bitter pang. He had a flashback to what happened in the Dusk2Dawn that summer of 2012, when an irritable Robbie had ragged on him, and then Wendy, his secret crush, had defended him in the worst way she possibly could: "Come on, leave him alone. He's just a little kid. "

 _Just a little kid_. And now that he was sixteen and watching himself as a twelve-year-old running from a cannibalistic monster head, he knew what she had seen in him back then, and he ached with shame and regret. Wait, though, he remembered this—this was when he fled inside the mall, scared and hungry, and—

"Wendy's in there," he whispered to Mabel. "She and Toby Determined!"

The monstrous head pursued the younger Dipper into the mall, failed to break open the door, and turned away, discouraged and grumbling. Fortunately it lurched directly away from the twins. "Funny," Dipper said. "I remember him so well, but his voice sounds a little different."

They darted across the street, and Mabel pointed to the sky and said, "There's the Fearamid! Remember?"

"I still have nightmares," Dipper reminded her.

They found a back way into the mall and even watched from the derelict food court as Wendy led the young version of Dipper to the emergency stairway that led up to the roof. "Man," Mabel whispered, "if Wendy could see you the way you are now—you two would be perfect for each other! I mean, she'd probably run away with you and get married right now if you—"

"Don't tempt me," Dipper said. "Focus, Sis. Focus."

They snuck up the stairs and then hid behind the air-conditioning unit, eavesdropping as Dipper confessed to Wendy that he didn't think he could defeat Bill again, because he didn't have Mabel this time. And Wendy's pep talk—they had to find Mabel, team up, and beat Bill. And Dipper's realization that the big orb over between the cliffs must be where Mabel was—there was a shooting-star emblem on it—but how to get there?

Then they heard Wendy's defiant, confident, "I think I have an idea" as she looked down at the Discount Auto Sales lot.

"Oh, man," Dipper whispered to Mabel as they watched the younger Wendy and Dipper hurry down the stairs. "We're off now to hijack that tricked-out police cruiser! And Wendy's gonna drop-kick Li'l Gideon! And then we have that chase to get to you in Mabel Land!"

"Let's go watch!" Mabel said.

Again Dipper grabbed her arm to restrain her. "We have to find whatever Blendin stashed or dropped here, remember?"

"Who's to say it's not up there on the cliffs? Come on, Broseph! Man up!"

They didn't quite make it to the used-car lot in time to see the epic drop-kick—they kept having to dodge lurking, prowling monsters—but they did hear Gideon's high-pitched squeal. A moment later they crouched as first Dipper and Wendy roared out of the lot in the souped-up police black-and-white, pursued by Gideon's furious troop of post-apocalyptic Discount Auto Warriors. They found a vehicle that Wendy had bypassed and the Road Warriors had ignored—a humble, battered yellow VW bug.

"Climb in," Dipper said.

Mabel struggled to push past him. "Let me drive!"

"Can you hotwire a car?" Dipper demanded.

That stopped her. She gave him a wild glare. "No, and neither can you!"

"Wrong," Dipper said, pulling out some wires and crossing them. The engine coughed to life. "I learned that skill from Wendy," he said. "Part of what you call our mental voodoo. Seat belt! And here we go."

The banged-up little wreck wasn't very fast, and it lagged badly in the chase. They swerved around the horrible sweaty-head monster, who had finally swept some victims—car and all—into its mouth and was furiously chomping on them. They dodged the madness balls, all except for two. Mabel briefly transformed into her uncute self from the Mindscape, Dipper grew a hole in his chest, and then they were normal again, and next they became conjoined twins, two heads, three arms, and three legs, making driving awkward and complicated.

But they pushed through the madness field, took the long way around the chasm, saw the Road Warriors driving off in a cloud of dust to head off Bill's eyebats, and then ditched the Bug, which died anyway as they got close to the cliff overlooking the ancient railroad bridge and the Mabel bubble.

They hid and watched younger Dipper and Wendy and Soos join hands "for Mabel!"

Mabel reached out and put her arm around her twin. "Dip," she said hoarsely, "thank you so much. I just never knew."

"Sis, you always know. Sometimes you and me, we forget a little, that's all."

They lay stretched out on their stomachs again. Something buzzed, and Dipper reached into his pants pocket. The time-travel gizmo was vibrating but without sound. He pressed the round button, and in his spectacles he suddenly saw a pulsating, glowing point of pure blue-white light. "I think it's here, whatever we're looking for! " Dipper said.

"Yeah, I see it too! I'm gonna get me a pair of these cool specs when this is over! Think of the gaming possibilities!" Then she grunted. "Uh-oh. Dipper, the signal—I think it's coming from inside Mabel Land!"

She was right. It was somewhere in that hyperglycemic, psychedelic, wacked-out wonderland. "Oh, man," he groaned. "I so do _not_ want to go back in there!"

However, they did not have to. Before either of them could budge, Mabel Land exploded like a bursting balloon, and a leaping, giant Waddles flew twenty feet over their heads. They scrambled to conceal themselves as Soos, Mabel, Dipper, and Wendy landed, Waddles shrank to his normal size, and fallout from Mabel Land drifted down over them. They watched the younger versions of themselves set off on the long trek down the cliff-side road and back to town.

"Huh," Dipper said. "Time passes differently in there, 'cause we were in for like, a whole day. I was right."

"I still see the glittery light," Mabel said, pushing herself up once the others were out of sight. "I think it's fallen in the woods somewhere over here."

They had to hurry—a dark cloud of eyebats, probably attracted by the bursting of Mabel's bubble, came streaming their way. They pushed through brush and froze when Dipper heard a voice: ". . . Sartre postulated that every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance."

A second voice answered, "Totally righteous, bro!"

And the first said, "I know!"

Mabel burst out from cover before Dipper could stop her. "Xyler! Craz! Guys, quick! Over here, hurry, into the brush!"

Sounding delighted, Xyler said, "Dude, look! Mabel totally survived!"

Craz was just as overjoyed: "I know, bro! And she's become more bodacious than ever!"

" _These_ guys," Dipper groaned.

The two radical and brightly colored young men hurried into the underbrush. Mabel shoved them down flat. "Lie still!"

The bats wheeled in, circling, obviously sizing up the situation. They whirled three or four times, apparently failed to spot the fugitives from Mabel Land, and then sped off in a flock back toward the Fearamid. "OK," Mabel said. "I think it's safe. How the heck did you guys live through all that?"

"The confetti from the explosion totally cushioned our fall!" Xyler said.

"Far out, right?" chimed in Craz. The two high-fived.

"But you guys aren't _real_!" Mabel said. "I mean, you're just my dream guys!"

"Uh-oh!" Craz said. "I think somebody has a major crush on us, Xyler!"

"We love you too, Mabel! You're our dream girl!" Xyler said. They couldn't talk without exclamation points, Dipper noticed.

"Hey," Dipper said, "I don't want to break up the party—"

"Hey, ho, look, Xyler! It's Dippy Fresh!" Craz said.

"It is _not_ Dippy Fresh!" Dipper snarled. God, how he hoped that Dippy Fresh had not survived the disintegration of Mabel Land! "It's me, Dipper!"

"My man Dipper!" Xyler said. "Bro, I hope you're not too bummed by our being all medieval legal on your butt. We were just doing our job!"

"But you're _imaginary_!" Mabel said. "I can't figure out how come you guys didn't vanish."

"Oh, that," Craz said. "Every living thing must survive according to immutable imperatives."

"Whoa, dude! Nietzschean!" Xyler exclaimed. "High five!"

Dipper rubbed his eyes. "And in English, that means-?"

"We can't, like, return to the Mindscape—"

"From whence we came, dude!"

"—until we fulfill our most totally righteous imperative!"

"Which is to give Mabel this!" Xyler handed Mabel a small cardboard box, about the size of a wallet. "Oh, and now we gotta motivate, Mabel. Gonna miss you."

"Last hug?" Craz asked.

Mabel shook her head. "Oh, you guys. Come here."

They faded to nothing while she hugged them.

"You took that well," Dipper said.

"I think I just outgrew them," Mabel said a little sadly. She sniffled a little and then opened the box. Something inside had been wrapped in tissue paper. She unwrapped it. "Huh. A key-card dealy with Blendin's photo on it."

The photo, showing Blendin with the hair Mabel had time-wished for him, moved, and a tiny, high-pitched voice issued from the card: "Attention! This card is not in the possession of its rightful owner! Summon the Time-Law Enforcement Agents immediately!"

"Wow," Dipper said. "Fake Blendin doesn't stammer! Still sounds a little like the kid in _Nick and Shorty_ , though."

"Attention!" the card squeaked again.

"Oh, shut up." Mabel put the card into the box, and the noise ceased. "Fat lot of good this does us!"

"Wait a minute," Dipper said. "Here's something else. Look at the paper it was wrapped in."

"Oh, man, one of _those_ deals?" Mabel asked, looking at the penciled set of numbers and dashes.

"No, no, this might be good," Dipper said. "I think it's a simple A1Z26 substitution, like that letter Blendin hid, uh, I guess the word should be 'sent' to us from 1883. Which means that if Xyler and Craz were supposed to give this to you specifically, to Mabel, like they said, then Blendin not only wrote it, but wanted us to find it."

"You're giving me a brain ache! I need some ice cream," Mabel complained.

"First let's get a little deeper in the woods. We need a place to figure this out."

They found a deadfall of trees, the victims of some past windstorm, that had fallen together and formed a little cave-like opening, maybe five feet tall and ten deep. They crept into the shelter of this. From time to time they heard disturbing, distant sounds: screams, maniacal laughter, the bellows of unearthly creatures. Dipper stared at the paper, murmuring to himself: "I-F-A-um, N . . . Definitely a cipher."

"Yeah, yeah," Mabel said, her hands on her cheeks. "I might as well not be here for the boring part."

"You had to be here," Dipper told her with a smile. "Blendin told the guys to give it to you, not to us. You get it, I solve it. Mystery Twins."

"Mystery Twins," she said. "That's the one thing that never gets old."

Dipper patted her cheek. "OK, let me work on this. If I can solve it, and I think I can—maybe we'll know where we have to travel next." Dipper reached into his pocket and produced a pen. "Hey, look. Now if I just had some paper—wait, here's a little pocket notebook. Huh, the TPAES guys think of everything."

Mabel sighed in an exaggerated way and leaned back on the leaf mould, cross-legged, while Dipper began to click the pen as he stared at the figures on the paper:

9-6-1-14-25-15-14-5-6-9-14-4-19-20-8-9-19-20-1-11-5-9-20-20-15-13-1-2-5-12-1-14-4-4-9-16-16-5-18-16-9-14-5-19

8-5-12-12-15-20-23-9-14-19-1-12-12-9-19-12-15-19-20-2-9-12-12-3-9-16-8-5-18-4-9-19-9-14-20-5-7-18-1-20-5-4-20-9-13-5-2-1-2-25

20-8-5-20-9-13-5-19-17-21-1-4-23-9-12-12-20-9-13-5-5-18-1-19-5-13-5-9-6-20-8-5-25-3-1-20-3-8-13-5

9-6-25-15-21-19-21-18-22-9-22-5-4-20-8-5-5-14-4-15-6-20-8-5-23-15-18-12-4-25-15-21-3-1-14-6-9-14-4-13-5-1-7-1-9-14

23-8-5-14-23-5-14-4-25-3-5-12-5-2-18-1-20-5-19-8-5-18-20-23-5-12-6-20-8-2-9-18-20-8-4-1-25-1-20-20-8-5-12-15-3-1-12-13-1-12-12

9-6-9-1-13-14-15-20-20-8-5-18-5-12-15-15-11-6-15-18-1-20-9-13-5-1-14-15-13-1-12-25-1-14-4-1-3-12-21-5

9-13-21-19-20-7-5-20-15-21-20-15-6-20-9-13-5-4-15-4-7-5

9-6-25-15-21-4-9-4-14-15-20-19-21-18-22-9-22-5-20-8-5-5-14-4-15-6-20-8-5-23-15-18-12-4-14-5-22-5-18-13-9-14-4


	3. Chapter 3

**3: It's My Party**

 **(May 21, 2009)**

* * *

"We wound up at the Shack again," Mabel said as soon as the time-travel clickers worked their scientific magic. "Looks like it's springtime, or maybe the first of summer." That was right—birds were chirping, a morning sun was shining overhead in a clear sky, and in the distance woodpeckers were hammering—it reminded Dipper of the day they first stepped off the bus in Gravity Falls. "Think it's May or June?" Mabel asked.

"Yeah, May 21, and it must be 2009," Dipper said. "That's when she would have turned twelve."

"If you decoded the message right, you mean." Then, with a bit of anxiety, Mabel asked, "Dip, you're not gonna go all creepy stalker if you see Wendy when she was twelve, are you? 'Cause that could totally wreck your chances with her in the present. Or the future. Or this present's future. Man, time travel really screws with my head!"

"I hope she won't even recognize me," Dipper said. Then he glanced at Mabel and did a double-take. "Hey, our clothes have changed!"

Mabel said, "Huh. I'm usually the first to notice fashion trends—yeah, I see." She was wearing a short-sleeved two-tone pink sweater (shoulders shocking, torso hot) and red slacks. Dipper wore a long-sleeved pullover shirt (sleeves dark blue, torso sky) and tan cargo shorts, with pristine white sneakers, no socks.

"She's gonna remember you when she's fifteen and you show up at age twelve," Mabel warned. "Hey, wait a minute—let me try this." She tapped the controls on the time-travel device and . . . changed. Her hair suddenly became blond, her cheekbones more prominent, her rosy complexion paler, her brown eyes blue. Then the glasses she wore became fashionable shades, a light amber. "I just fooled around with the button and found an auto-disguise feature! How cool is that?"

"What did you do?" Dipper asked.

"Told you, I found the 'disguise' option. Here, I'll do you."

She took his controller thumbed it, and Dipper saw various options flashing by on the inner screen of his spectacles, going too fast to register with him. Mabel wouldn't be able to see them, but she arbitrarily stopped the display with a flick of her thumb. "Perfecto!" Mabel exclaimed, beaming at him. He felt an electric tingle in the air around himself.

"Did I change?" he asked.

"Brobro, look at your arms!"

The long sleeves had vanished, and at first Dipper thought he was instead wearing some kind of very thin paisley material, a tee shirt under the dark blue vest. But then he saw the intricate patterns, geometric shapes, hearts, stars, snakes, skulls—"I'm tattooed!" he squawked.

"Are you ever! And your face is real different, too. Hey, let's go into the Shack! I wanna look in a mirror and really check these disguises out!"

They found the Shack open for business, with a few tourists poking around in the gift shop and a bored-looking skinny guy they didn't know at the register. But there was Soos, younger—a late teen, from the looks of him—humming as he tidied up with a dustpan and broom. They made their way to him. "Sir," Dipper said.

Soos looked startled. "Huh? Sir? Me, you mean?" He chuckled. "Sir is Mr. Pines. I'm just Soos."

"Um, could we possibly use your restroom, Soos?" Dipper asked quietly. "It's been a long trip."

Soos stroked his chin—no bristles of whiskers visible yet—and said, "I dunno, dawgs, Mr. Pines is pretty strict. If you don't buy something, he might, like, seriously object. But he's out on the Mystery Trail right now, so I suppose if you're quick you can do it. Closest one is around the corner. It's, like, unisex, so you guys will have to, like, take turns or some deal."

"Thanks!" The twins hurried around the corner and, defying standard practice and custom, instead of going into the public restroom, they went up the steps to the attic. Dozens of cardboard boxes cluttered the floor space.

"Man," Dipper said. "It's just a storage area!"

"'Cause Grunkle Stan didn't need an extra bedroom yet," Mabel said. "We were just nine and hadn't even heard of Gravity Falls."

"I hope the bathroom's still here."

"You mean already still here!"

"Whatever." Dipper opened a door.

It was the same bathroom they knew, though from the looks of things, it was rarely used. The mirror behind the sink was in place, though, and Dipper switched on the light and stared at himself, not recognizing the reflection. Now his hair was jet-black and fairly close-cropped, combed straight back. His forehead was unmarked by the Big Dipper birthmark—but his neck bore green and pink tattoos of Cthulhu or some such creature, along with a diving eagle. His nose was larger, and he sported a jet-black soul patch. His eyeglasses had, like Mabel's, become light amber-tinted shades. His complexion had darkened, though his eyes were a striking green. He looked sort of like the offspring of a beautiful Irish colleen and a sharp-featured Cheyenne warrior.

"Ooh," Mabel said, turning this way and that and admiring her reflection. "I am so pretty as a blonde! And look at you, Dip. You look like such a bad boy! Still about sixteen, I think, but a sixteen with _experience_!"

"I'll scare her looking like this," Dipper said. "Let's change it."

Mabel grabbed his wrist, preventing him from going back into disguise mode. "Brobro, trust me, Wendy won't be scared. Even if she's twelve. She'll be _intrigued!_ "

Well—it wasn't like she'd recognize him, anyway. "OK, I guess."

They made their way downstairs and let themselves out the back way. As they walked around the Shack, they heard Grunkle Stan giving his spiel: "And there's lots more unimaginable and bizarre stuff inside the Museum! Just fifteen dollars, and you'll be shocked! You'll be astounded! You may even be horrified! But think of the tales you'll have for the family back home! Worth every dime and more! Right this way!"

They glimpsed him ushering a crowd of tourists in through the Museum entrance. He didn't look very different from their first glimpse of him—now three years in the future—same suit and ribbon tie, same fez, same somewhat deranged but cheerful grin, same eight-ball-headed cane in his grip. He noticed them, too, and grumped at them: "Hey, kids! No loitering! Buy somethin' or skedaddle!"

"Go suck a lemon, old man!" Mabel yelled, and then she laughed like a loon.

Stan, ever the one to surprise them, cackled. "Suck a lemon! That's a good one! I'll have to remember that! But seriously, kids—scram!"

"Come on," Dipper said, and he and Mabel scrammed.

It was a mile-long walk to town, and then another couple of miles to the Mall, but the day was cool and pleasant, clear sky, bright sun, and Mabel didn't complain—much. "I wonder if we've got money," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket.

Yep, two twenties and a five—and, he saw, from the correct era: Series 2006, signed by Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr. "I wonder if this always works," he said. "What if I needed, uh, a 1792 half disme?" He searched his pocket and found a coin that hadn't been there before. "Wow," he said. "Mabel, we're rich!"

Mabel examined the silver coin—not too impressive, smaller than a quarter, with a woman whose hair looked as if it were tangling in a breeze. The words LIB. PAR. OF SCIENCE & INDUSTRY surrounded her head, and below her neck was the date 1792. The opposite side of the coin read, "UNIT. STATES OF AMERICA. A scrawny-looking eagle was flying in the center, and below it were the words HALF DISME. "Dismey?" she asked. "What's a dismey?"

"No, it's pronounced 'dime.' The s is silent."

"Oh, like in 'hithouse,'" Mabel said knowingly.

"Right—wait, what? Anyway, this is maybe the oldest minted coin in America. It's worth millions in an auction!"

The coin vanished with a poof of pinkish vapor.

"Uh-oh," Mabel teased. "Looks like you can't use your hammerspace pocket for nefarious purposes."

"Guess not," Dipper said. "Come on. At least the mall's in better shape than it will be during Weirdmageddon!"

"Let's get to the food court."

They went in at the entrance near Hoo-Ha Owl's Pizzamatronic Jamboree. As they passed, a skeeball broke the glass in the front door and bounced on the tiles in front of them. "She'll be in there," Mabel said knowingly.

"How can you tell?"

"That ball has the earmarks of one tossed by Manly Dan," she said.

Dipper nodded. "You've got a point there."

They went inside, where game bells were ringing, game buzzers were buzzing, and the animatronic figures were plunking out background music poorly synchronized to their jerky movements with their instruments. Manly Dan was arguing with a manager: "I _always_ throw that hard!"

"But you broke my door!"

"It's not a wood door! It don't count!"

"I spy with my little eye a party!" Mabel said. "Come on!" She led the way past the squabbling men. About a dozen kids clustered at four tables jammed together, eating pizza. Dipper recognized Tambry, already Gothed out in black tee shirt and black jeans, and spied Robbie, who looked as if he were stealing tickets from a broken skeeball machine—the one that Dan had been playing, Dipper guessed.

And then he glimpsed Wendy. Already much taller than Dipper had been at twelve, she was laughing, showing off her braces. A cake in the shape of a redwood stump was on the table, twelve pinecone-shaped candles on it but unlit.

"Who's the birthday girl?" Mabel asked cheerfully as she and Dipper walked past the table.

"I am!" Wendy said. "Hi!"

"Hi," Dipper said.

Wendy's green eyes sized him up. "I don't know you. Are you new in town?" she asked.

"Just passing through with my sister here," Dipper said.

"Hi, I'm Ma . . .ry. Mary Clemclocker! And this is my brother Chris Clemclocker! He's adopted."

"He's cute," Tambry pronounced.

"I saw him first," Wendy warned. "Hey, you want a slice of pizza? There's, like, plenty of it!"

"Sure," Mabel said, dragging Dipper into a chair. "So let me ask, what's your name?"

"I'm Wendy Corduroy," she said. "And I'm twelve today!"

"Congratulations!" Mabel said. "That's a great age. I'm sixteen, but I'd give anything to be twelve again. Enjoy it!" She engulfed about half a slice of pepperoni pizza. With her mouth full of crust and mozzarella, she added, "Wish we had a birthday present for you. Hey, Clark, see what you got in your pocket."

"I thought I was Chris," he whispered.

"That's what I said—his name's Christopher Clark Clemclocker. Chris for short and Clark for long."

He glared at her. "That doesn't make any—"

"See what you have," Mabel said, grimacing.

Dipper felt something plush and pulled out a small stuffed toy—head of a penguin, body of a purple hippo, and with the tail of a mouse. "Uh—this carnival prize," he said. "A creature of indeterminate species. If you want it—happy birthday, Wendy Corduroy."

"Ooh, I love it!" Wendy took the little toy—hardly bigger than Dipper's fist—from him and hugged it. "Thank you, Chris!"

"You're welcome," Dipper said.

"It's dumb," Robbie sneered. "Can't even tell what it's supposed to be!"

"It's a work of imagination," Mabel said firmly.

"Yeah," Wendy said. "Robbie runs everything down. Just like he did that weird picture-thing I found in the woods."

Dipper felt the time device silently vibrating. "Oh, we, uh, we kind of lost something like that," he said. For a moment he couldn't see Wendy because an image had formed in his spectacle lenses: it looked about the size of a playing card, though about six times as thick, was aluminum, and had what looked like a rectangular display screen on one side, no visible controls. He described it.

"That's it!" Wendy said. "Oh, my gosh, I just found it yesterday! Do you want it back?"

"Well," Dipper began.

"That would be so cool!" Mabel said. "Chet, you told me you'd offer a reward for it. Twenty dollars, right?"

"Uh, yeah, right," Dipper said. "Wendy, do you happen to have it with you?"

"No, it's at my house," she said. "Hey, I'll write the address down for you and you can stop by and claim it." Dipper handed her his pen and notebook, and she half-printed, half-wrote in cursive her address. "Want me to tell you how to find it?"

"No, we can get there," Dipper said. Heck, he could walk there while blindfolded after all the times he'd visited her. Or would visit her. Mabel was right, time travel messed with your mind. "What time?"

"How about this afternoon around four?"

"That's good for us!" Mabel said, finishing the last of her slice. "We'll drop by then. Come on, Chuck!"

As she hustled him toward the mall entrance, Dipper heard Robbie grumble, "He's got dumb tattoos! Probably he's, like, a gang member!"

"Shut up, Robbie. He looks hella tough," Wendy said.

"I think somebody's got her eye on you, Chad," Mabel crooned.

"Shut your yap," Dipper grumbled.

However—truth to tell—his heart was beating a little faster. They had three hours until four o'clock. And—man, it embarrassed him to think about it—he, the sixteen-year-old Christopher Clark Chet Chuck Clemclocker Dipper Pines—couldn't wait to see the cute twelve-year-old Wendy Corduroy again.

"This is so wrong," he moaned. "I feel so weird about this!"

"Now," Mabel said, "you _really_ know how she used to feel!"


	4. Chapter 4

**4: Star-Crossed**

 **(May 21, 2009)**

* * *

It was a good seven miles out to the Corduroy house, and here they were without wheels. Just a couple of ground-walkers. Dipper thought he could make it, but Mabel confessed she was pooped. However . . . . "I saw the golf cart behind the Shack," Mabel offered. "It looks like it's in great shape!"

Well, yeah, considering that it would be three years older the next time they saw it, which would be the first time they saw it. The usual confusion of time-travel made the point a little difficult to grasp. "But we can't just _steal_ it," Dipper objected.

Mabel walked out of the mall, with Dipper trailing a step behind. She said, "Come on. Love will find a way! And by love I mean—"

"Soos's affection for us?"

"No. Me, Mabel!"

They hitchhiked a ride as far as the long drive up the hill to the Shack with a farmer returning from having hauled a load of asparagus to the grocery store. He was talkative, asking them if they were going to come back for that year's Woodstick, judging that anybody who looked and dressed the way they did must be musicians.

Dipper said no, Mabel complained that the truck smelled like asparagus, and the farmer took them just to the foot of the drive before letting them out. The truck rumbled away. Dipper said, "The entrance looks so drab now, without the sign you painted and the mountain laurel that Stan planted. Come on, let's see what we can do about the golf cart."

They went up the hill, entered the gift shop—Grunkle Stan was there, busily encouraging tourists to buy—and to keep him pacified, Dipper spent most of one twenty-dollar bill on a map of Roadkill County that he really didn't need. When on the half-hour Stan next took a tram-load of tourists out, Mabel went into a huddle with Soos.

She came back grinning and twirling the key. "Let's go, Broseph, before Grunkle Stan gets back."

She insisted on driving. First, though, she said, "I really need an Oregon driver's license!" She reached into her pocket. "Aw, nuts."

"Let me try," Dipper said. "My Sis needs an Oregon driver's license in the name of Mary—uh, Mary—"

"Clobberjowl," Mabel put in helpfully.

Dipper scowled. "That's not right!"

"I can't remember the other one! And it'll do. Come on, I'm not gonna show it to Wendy!"

"Clobberedowl," Dipper said. "Uh, address, um, 1234 Easy Street, Ebbets, Oregon." He reached into his pocket, felt the laminated card, and handed it over. "I guess I'm the Bag of Holding," he said.

"Yuck, what a crummy photo," Mabel complained, but she tucked the license into her jeans pocket and they started forward.

"What did you tell Soos?" Dipper asked.

Mabel sounded smug: "Aw, I told him that our hog had broken down and we had the part we needed to get it running again, but we were awfully tired from walking to town and back, and if he'd lend us the golf cart, I promised to get it back by six o'clock." She paused and then said, "I told him we were trying to get home for our poor sick dad's birthday."

Dipper frowned. Soos and dads. "That was pretty low, Mabel."

"Yup," she agreed cheerfully. "Can I read Soos like a book or what?"

"He bought that we ride a Harley?" Dipper asked.

"No, I think he thinks we travel on the back of an actual hog. Oh, and I warned him that we thought the mailman is a werewolf."

"So that's where he got the idea."

"Shut up and let me concentrate. I'm not used to driving something as underpowered as this hunk of junk."

The cart wasn't fast—about twelve miles per hour was its top speed—but it hummed along reliably. They took shortcuts across country when possible and arrived at the crooked drive leading downhill to the Corduroy house at a few minutes before four. "Huh," Dipper said. "Looks like they're not back from town yet."

A Jeep stood there—not the one that Dipper remembered—but the pickup, Dan's usual vehicle of choice when transporting the family, was gone.

But when they parked, the front door of the cabin opened, and there stood Wendy, all freckles, braids, and metal-braced grin. "You came!" she said. "I've got the whatchamacallit. Come on inside."

They did. The TV was an older model, but the living room looked the same as always, big fireplace, bearskin rug, saggy sofa—any sofa that Manly Dan sat on became instantly saggy—the familiar things. Dipper remembered with a little pang all those evenings of sitting on the floor, on the rug, with a blanket around him and his Lumberjack Girl, snuggling and giggling over bad movies.

And now the twelve-year-old Wendy gazed at him with starry eyes. "Are you, like, tattooed _all over_?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Dipper said.

"My brother is _such_ a rebel," Mabel said. "Aren't you, Casey?"

"Isn't your name Chris, dude?" Wendy asked.

"Yes—" Dipper started.

Mabel chuckled. "Oh, Casey is his _road_ name!"

"What's that?" Wendy asked.

Mabel mimed gripping handlebars. "You know, riding that big Harlan all over the country, getting into trouble, outrunning the law, seeking adventures and new life and civilizations. The usual."

Wendy looked entranced. "You're a biker? For real?"

Before Dipper could say anything Mabel said, "Sure he is, sister! You should see him when he gets up to speed, that big hot machine between his legs—"

"It's not all _that_ exciting," Dipper said. "Really."

"Anyhow, his bike's broken down and we have to go fix it up. Soos—you know Soos?"

"Uh-huh, he helps Mr. Pines in the Mystery Shack. Nice guy."

"Right. He lent us the golf cart. Soon's we collect Cody's thing he lost but you found, we gotta get rolling."

"Cody?"

Mabel whispered, "It's a _new_ alias. We came through Wyoming last week. Now the Wyoming Rangers are after him. We thought Texas Rangers were tough, but man!"

"Wow."

"OK, Mary, that's enough," Dipper said firmly. "Look, if you'll give me the device you found—"

"It's a fuzz detector," Mary confided.

"—I'll pay you the twenty dollars and we'll be on our way. And it is not a fuzz detector."

Wendy started back through the short hall. "OK, you come with me. It's in my room."

"I'll wait here," Mabel said. "I like to look at an empty fireplace. You two hurry."

Like the living room, Wendy's bedroom was much the same—different posters on the wall, some watercolors and sketches she had done, not as good as Mabel's art these days, but showing her interest in the birds and animals of the forest. "It's in a box under the bed," Wendy said. "Kinda in the middle. Could you pull it out for me?"

"Sure." Dipper had to kneel and bend over and reach way back to snag the corner of the cardboard box. He dragged it out—

And Wendy threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Right on the lips. It wasn't exactly an exciting kiss, close-lipped and ending with an embarrassing _smack_. It was the kiss of a girl who hadn't practiced. Then she said, "Take me with you?"

Dipper glimpsed the aluminum device and picked it up out of the box. "Where'd you find this?"

"It was out in the road the other morning. I saw it when I went to get the paper and picked it up. Can I go with you, please? Please, Chris?"

He sat on the edge of the bed, and she hopped up beside him. Odd how short she was—half a head shorter than he was, but he knew she'd more than make up for that in the next three years. "Can't do that, Wendy," he said softly. "Where are your dad and your brothers?"

"They've got a tree removal job way across the valley." Wendy frowned. "How'd you know I've got brothers?"

"Saw the shoes in the living room," Dipper improvised.

"Yeah, I always have to pick up after them. You're pretty sharp. Come on. Let me go with you, Chris."

"I'm sorry, no. And, uh, don't go kissing every guy you see, OK?"

Wendy blushed a glowing pink. "That was my first kiss," she whispered.

"You'll make some guy really happy one day," Dipper said. "You're a beautiful girl."

She shook her head, her expression crumpling into unhappiness. "No, I'm not. I'm a freak. I'm like taller than Robbie already, and look at these freckles. And I _hate_ my braces, and, and I hate my life."

"You wouldn't like mine, either. Mary was exaggerating," Dipper said. "I'm not really a biker outlaw. I'm just, you know, a kid. And I'm four years older than you are. I'm too old for you. I mean, you know that, right?"

She hung her head. "I'm so sick of this place. I just wish I could go. Wish I could live in Portland or, like, anywhere but here!"

"One day you will. You'll spread your wings like a beautiful bird and fly away. But—from what I saw of your dad—he loves you a lot."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "He doesn't show it. Making me his maid. Making me work like a dog."

"He's a guy," Dipper said. "Guys can be pretty dumb about stuff like that. But down deep I know he must love you. You stay here. You know, if you wait, good things will happen. But tempting though it is—I can't see you on my bike, driving through a pouring rain. Scrounging in dumpsters for a meal. Sleeping in a culvert during a snowstorm. Never getting an education."

She shook her head. "I'm no good in school."

Dipper took her hand. "You're a smart girl. I can tell. I'll bet you know all about the woods."

That earned him a heart-melting crooked smile. "Well, yeah, that. I'm a whiz at lumberjack games."

"You can be a whiz at anything."

She raised his hand and kissed it. "But I think I'm in love with you, Chris."

Dang. It wasn't working. Dipper put his arm around the girl and said, "OK, I can't take it. You'd be a pretty good girl to have around, I guess. You're right. Let's run away!"

"You mean it?" Her grin spread right across her face.

"Let's go, right now. We'll have to run about a thousand miles before we even rest, though, 'cause your old man will be after us—"

The grin faded. "He . . . yeah, he . . . he will, won't he?"

"We don't care! He may be big, but we can wait for him with baseball bats and jump him from behind—"

"Jump my dad?"

"You know if we don't, he won't stop until he kills me and drags you back home. I may not live through the next week, but who cares? It's worth it! Let's make out right here!"

Looking alarmed, she scooted away. "I—I don't think—"

Dipper put on a wounded expression. "Wendy! You're breaking up with me?"

"I—yeah, I guess I am," she said. "I didn't think it through. I was so stupid. I'm sorry, Chris."

"Probably for the best." He took the twenty out of his pocket and tucked it under her pillow. "Happy birthday, kid. Hope to see you again sometime."

"I'll sleep with the toy on my pillow," she said. Oh, that teary-eyed smile reached inside him and squeezed his heart.

He patted her shoulder. "You do that. And look for a guy who won't treat you bad. Not ever. You'll find one, I promise."

He hugged her and then he and Mabel said their goodbyes and hurried away.

Halfway back to the Shack, Mabel asked, "Dipper? You crying?"

"I guess. A little."

"What happened in there?"

"She wanted to run away with me. On the motorcycle I don't have. But then she thought about her dad and how he'd be hurt, and how he'd probably kill us both, so she broke up with me." He gave a sad little chuckle. "Guess what? I was her first kiss. Only she'll never know that."

"'That guy with the tattoos,'" Mabel said thoughtfully. "If it's any consolation, Brobro, when she's fifteen, she'll still remember you."

* * *

They returned the cart, gave Soos the five bucks—leaving Dipper with about a dollar and a quarter in his pocket, but he figured he could conjure up more at any time—and then Mabel said, "OK, what we got here?"

"Let's walk down the trail a ways," Dipper said. "See if we can figure it out."

They went to the bonfire clearing—it looked as though Stan had just recently had the trees cut down and the ground leveled, and Manly Dan, Dipper thought, had probably done the work for him—and sat on a freshly-made bench, really a log braced with stones.

Dipper took the device from his pocket. "Looks like a cell phone, but there aren't any controls."

"Gimme."

"Mabel, don't be grabby!"

"C'mon, Broman, a teenage girl knows phones!"

"Here. But don't break it."

Mabel fiddled with it but could find no way of turning it on. Tapping, swiping, and shaking did not work. "Give me your secrets!" she commanded.

"Maybe there's a password," Dipper said.

And the screen lit up blue. "Speak personal password now for Blendin Blenjamin Blandin," an AI voice said pleasantly.

"Password!" Mabel said triumphantly.

The screen turned briefly red. "That is incorrect. You have five attempts remaining."

"Time Baby!"

Red again, and four attempts remaining.

"Mabel—" Dipper said.

Red again. Three.

Dipper signaled for silence. He put the device on the log and hauled Mabel a good many steps away. Then he whispered, "We have to think about this! It'll be a word that means something to Blendin. We can't just guess, we have to figure it out."

Mabel made two more guesses: "Blendin" and "Blandin."

And they were down to one attempt.

They left the device on the log and paced, thinking furiously. "This is our last chance," Dipper said. "If we fail, this is it—we fail the whole mission!"

"What would Blendin say?" Mabel murmured.

And Dipper laughed. He beckoned her over to the log, picked up the device, and said, "I—I—I—I—I—"

"Password accepted."

The screen lit up with—"Another code?" Mabel said, groaning. "Oh, man!"

Dipper took out the pen and pad and handed the device to Mabel. "Read the numbers and dashes out," he said. "Clearly. This is important. Mabel—be serious!"

"As a Congressperson!" she said. She put a properly serious frown on her disguised face, and as Dipper's pen flew, she read out the cipher:

* * *

-8-4-3-20-/-8-12-2-2-4-20-/-3-17-8-/-16-3-6-4-15-:

-22-4-20-25-/-10-18-18-8-.

-1-11-4-/-8-4-22-12-7-4-/-25-18-21-/-17-18-23-/-11-3-22-4-/-8-4-1-4-7-1-5-/-3-17-3-7-11-20-18-17-12-5-16-5-/-12-17-/-1-12-16-4-/-15-12-17-4-5-.

-25-18-21-/-23-12-15-15-/-17-4-4-8-/-12-1-/-9-18-20-/-25-18-21-20-/-17-4-24-1-/-1-12-16-4-/-15-4-3-2-.

-8-18-17-'-1-/-15-4-1-/-3-17-25-/-1-2-3-4-5-/-3-10-4-17-1-5-/-9-18-15-15-18-23-/-25-18-21-.

-23-4-/-17-4-4-8-/-3-/2-15-3-17-/-1-18-/-20-4-5-7-21-4-/-1-11-4-/-16-4-17-/-7-12-2-11-4-20-/-8-4-5-1-20-18-25-4-8-/-3-17-8-/-1-12-16-4-/6-3-6-25-/1-18-18-.

-12-/-11-18-2-4-/-25-18-21-/-11-3-22-4-/-3-/-2-15-3-17-.

-17-4-24-1-/-7-15-21-4-/-12-5-/-23-11-4-20-4-/-3-17-8-/-23-11-4-17-/-25-18-21-/-1-23-18-/-23-4-20-4-/-6-18-20-17-.

-10-18-18-8-/-15-21-7-14-.

-6-15-4-17-8-12-17-

Dipper began to scan through as soon as he had finished. Then he frowned. "Something," he said, "is way off."


	5. Chapter 5

**5: Getting Nowhen**

 **(?)**

* * *

"What the heck?" Mabel asked as the world vanished around them.

"Whoa!" Dipper held onto the pen and pad, but his tattoos vanished, and suddenly he was in the same outfit that Lolph had provided them. So was Mabel. Their disguises were gone, too, along with the bonfire clearing.

Instead, they had _boomped_ down on their butts to the floor of a white room, cubical, eight by eight by eight feet. No windows, no doors, but it had light—coming from the ceiling or the walls or everywhere. "What happened?" Mabel asked, rubbing her injured pride.

The wall behind her told them, in a patient, uninflected voice: "Your time limit for this part of the investigation has expired and you have been returned to the ready room or time-prison cell."

"Which one is it?" Dipper asked.

"Its exact status yet to be determined."

"Prison?" Mabel asked, springing to her feet and pounding on the wall. "No prison can hold Mabel Pines! Get me a mouthpiece! I was framed!"

"Your antiquated moving-picture references have been noted. And that tickles. The Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squad has a message for you: Determine the next stage of your investigation and enter the coordinates and engage the time-travel device and you will be released."

"Great," Dipper said. "Look, uh, wall, all we have so far is a mess. Uh, can you see?"

"Each wall is embedded with photoreceptors."

Dipper rolled his eyes. "Oh, _good_. Look, here's the clue we found. Numbers, see, like a cipher? I thought it was an A1Z26, but that makes no sense. Here's my first attempt to decipher it."

He held up the sheet with the gibberish:

* * *

hdct hlbbdt cqh pcfdo

vdty jrrh

akd hdvlgd yru qrw kcvd hdadgae cqcgktrqlepe lq alpd olqde

yru wloo qddh la irt yrut qdxa alpd odcb

hrq'a oda cqy abcde cjdqae iroorw yru

wd qddh c bocq ar tdegud akd pdq glbkdt hdeatrydh cqh alpd fcfy arr

l krbd yru kcvd c bocq

qdxa goud le wkdtd cqh wkdq yru awr wdtd frtq

jrrh ougn

fodqhlq

* * *

"Can you help?" he asked. "Like run this through a supercomputer—"

"Negative. The TPAES analysis has indicated that any helpful input from TPAES will contaminate the effort and result in your never being able to locate the target."

"Target?" Mabel asked. She mimed holding a shotgun. "You mean as 'Be vewy, vewy quiet. I'm hunting Bwendins?'"

"Your humorous reference to a trademarked animated cartoon character is noted. For the record, ha ha. There is no intent to shoot the target. The target must be persuaded to remedy the situation of which you are aware. You are authorized to know the code word for the operation is Boughbreak."

 _Great. As in when the bough breaks, the baby_ —"I'm liking this less," Dipper confessed. "Can we have privacy?"

"No. Your actions must be monitored."

"And, uh, reported?"

"No. No human agent of TPAES may be made aware of your actions before the outcome is decided by success or failure. That is to avoid contamination."

"Gotcha." Dipper clicked his pen. "Um. OK, have to trust you on that one, so I'll work on this. Please don't interrupt."

The wall answered with silence. For a few minutes Dipper scribbled.

"What's wrong, Brobro?" Mabel asked. They both lay on the floor on their stomachs—more comfortable than sitting with their backs against a wall—and she looked on.

Dipper showed his work, not that it seemed to mean anything. "Well, see, in the cipher, 1 ought to be A, 2 should be B, 3 C, and so on. But that produces nothing except this mess. Something's off. The letters have been shifted or something. Let me do a count."

He clicked the ballpoint so the point was inside the barrel, then tapped each number as he went through the cipher. He did this twenty-four times, then scratched his head. "Huh. This doesn't really help."

"What's the deal?" Mabel asked.

"Well, I'm doing a frequency count," Dipper explained. "See, in normal English—maybe this isn't English! No, wait, I have to assume it is or I'll get nowhere. In normal English, the letter that appears most frequently is E. That means that in the cipher, E would be number 4. Normally, see, it would be number 5, because it's the fifth letter of the alphabet. In order, the next most common letters are T, A, O, N, R, I, S, H, and D. OK, so if the numbers were shifted back, making 5 4, then A should be 2. Instead of 26, Z would be 1—what's wrong?"

"I think I'm going stir-crazy," Mabel said. "Or you are. This is like living in a bowl of alphabet soup! Why can't we just do this like Grunkle Stan on _Cash Wheel_? Maybe it says 'Shut your yaps!'"

"We can't just guess. Have some patience," Dipper advised. "I can't see the pattern yet, because I don't think 2 can stand for A. Not enough appearances. Looks like 3. But how could 3 be A and 4 be E? I'm missing something."

"Man," Mabel muttered, "I don't understand any of this. I really do feel like Elmer Fudd."

Dipper was chewing on the pen. "Hm?"

Mabel nudged him. "You know, 'Be vewy vewy—"

"Mabel! You can't just cross-reference characters from Warner Brothers like that!"

"Deadpool does it."

"You're too young to see _Deadpool._ It's rated R."

"No, I'm the older twin, remember. You're still too young to see it. I snuck out last February and caught it. They didn't even check my ID. If Deadpool can do it I can. Elmer Fudd! Elmer Fudd! Elmer Fudd!"

"Shush, that's so distracting—but wait a minute, wait a minute, let me try something. Oh ho!"

She slapped his shoulder. "Don't you dare call me that! I'm your sister!"

Dipper flinched, but said, "No, that only was an exclamation of surprise. Look here—this word." He copied it out: -22-4-20-25. Under it he wrote his conjecture: V-E-R-Y. "I got that from your reference: vewy. Very in non-Fudd speak."

"And that works with the number thing?" Mabel asked.

"No. And yes."

Mabel rolled on her back and covered her face with both hands. "Gah!"

Dipper sat up and said, "Look, the V should be 22 normally, and it is. But the E should be 5, and it's 4. The R should be 18, but it's 20. The Y is normal again, 25. Some of the letters' numbers are different, but some are the same."

Still through her hands, Mabel asked, "Are we both the same, you and me? I mean both of us insane?"

Dipper clicked his pen. "I think I see what's going on. Blendin inserted a key word at the beginning of the alphabet, one that didn't repeat any letters. Like, oh, WHITE. Then he started the alphabet, but he skipped the ones already in the key word. Like W-1, H-2, I-3, T-4, E-5, A-6, B-7, C-8, D-9, F-10. Because E has already been used, see?"

Mabel still didn't move her hands from her face and said in a muffled way, "No."

"Hold on, I think I have an idea." Dipper looked at his frequency count. "What if the first word is 'dear?' Look at the first line."

Mabel leaned her chin on her hand and stared at 8-4-3-20-/8-12-2-2-4-20-/3-17-8-/16-3-6-4-15. "I see it," she said.

"It looks like the 4-3 in the first four-letter word is E-A. Let's assume that 8 is D, 4 is E, like the frequency suggests, 3 is A, and 20 is R. If I substitute—" he wrote quickly—"I get D-E-A-R. That makes the next word D-12-2-2-E-R. Next is A-17-D, see? D something double letter E R. Dipper! Dipper and . . . "

"Me, Mabel!" she said happily as she finally sat up and looked. "Yeah, the A and the E are in the right place!'

"Next word is the one you mentioned, 'very,' and the next one, with a double letter and ending in D, is probably good."

Mabel frowned. "Yeah, but what is it?"

"Good! _Very good,_ see?"

Mabel bounced on her butt. " _That_ kind of good! Yay for us! High five!"

"Ow!"

"You know I high five hard!"

Dipper was again scrawling letters, crossing some out and changing them. "Mabel, I think we can figure this out!"

Mabel crossed her arms like Grunkle Stan when he oversaw them dusting the gift shop. "Do it. You figure. I'll supervise!"

And that was how they discovered where and when to go next. Oh, and that the key word at the beginning of Blendin's cipher was TPAES.


	6. Chapter 6

**6: Get Back**

 **(August 31, 1999)**

* * *

"Well," Mabel said, "this is gonna be strange."

"Eh, we've seen stranger things," Dipper said. The twins had materialized under an early-morning sky on the tree-shaded lawn of a sprawling three-story building of tan brick and red tile on Broadway in Oakland, California. "The screen has an arrow pointing that way." He held in his hand the thin device they had retrieved from Wendy a few hours before—subjectively. She had actually given it to him about ten years in the future. They had traveled into the past again, and the screen showed the exact time and date: 5:55 A.M., Tuesday, August 31, 1999.

The day they were born. Or would be born—that event was now an hour or two ahead. "We need a disguise," Mabel said. She fiddled with the dial and settled on nursing scrubs. "Hey, look, I even have a name tag," she said.

"Yeah, but it says, 'Mabel Pines.' That's not such a great name."

She gave him a defiant frown. "It is great, too. It's mine!"

"OK, but think. What if Dad or Mom see it and ask if we're related?" Dipper said. "Awkward!"

Mabel nodded. "OK, you got a point. I'll see if I can change it." With a few flicks of buttons, she discovered she could and immediately became, as far as ID went, anyway, Florence Nightenmar. "I like it," she said.

"Needs a final 'e,'" Dipper said.

He couldn't make his own disguise function work properly—he did _not_ want to go dressed as a Vegas showgirl, though Mabel said admiringly, "Good look for you."

"I hate satin, purple's not my color, and I don't think the fishnets work. And bright blue eyeshadow? Please!" He tried again.

"Are you gonna arrest me?" Mabel asked. Now he wore a police uniform.

"How do you do this?" he grumbled.

"Oh, give it here," Mabel told him. She fiddled around and said, "There. You're a hospital orderly. Let me see, change your name tag . . . OK, there you go. Just remember your name is Marco Diaz."

"I don't look Hispanic!" he complained. "And I don't want another disguise! My arms itch after that tattoo incident, and I keep thinking I've got something on my chin!"

"Oh, picky, picky! Wait a second . . . all right, you're Mark O'Medisin."

Dipper rolled his eyes. "We are so gonna get kicked out," he complained, but the device screen was blinking an urgent red, which he took to mean "Hurry up!" "I guess it'll have to do. Let's go."

They found a staff entrance. Evidently a shift change was in progress, and they joined a gang of chattering nurses, candy-stripers, aides, and orderlies without attracting any notice. Inside, they split off from the group, looking for somewhere private. The insistent device directed them to a bank of elevators, up to the second floor, then through a maze of corridors to—

"Yep, pretty much what I figured," Dipper said. "Maternity wing." They stepped through a double door and into a brightly-lit hall that smelled of alcohol and hand sanitizer. They had to keep moving—people in a hurry were coming and going, and they couldn't risk loitering—but Dipper kept checking the locater device. "To the left," he said. "I guess—in there."

Above the door hung a sign: WAITING ROOM

They went in. Sitting on a sofa with their backs toward the door were two men, one dark-haired but graying, one dark-haired and with it worn long, down to his shoulders.

"Dad?" Mabel whispered. "He was a hippie!"

"Grunkle Stan?" Dipper whispered at the same moment.

Stan had his arm on the back of the sofa as if he'd been comforting Alex. "I tell ya, sometimes it takes hours. Days even. Heck, I know of one lady, they sent her home in March and the baby didn't come until May. True story."

"I appreciate your coming, Uncle Stanford," Alex said. "I don't know where Dad is—he's late."

"Eh, Shermie never was very punctual. Don't worry, he'll show up right after the nick of time. Monica coming, too?"

"She doesn't want to come until after the birth. You know Mom."

To Dipper's absolute astonishment, Mabel stepped boldly toward them and asked, "Excuse me, which of you is Mr. Pines?"

Stan jerked his thumb at himself as Mabel and Dipper came around to face them. "Me."

But their father had raised his hand. "I'm Mr. Pines."

"Let me make that clearer," Mabel said, smiling. "Which of you is the father-to-be?"

"Him!" Stan said, jerking his thumb toward Alex this time.

"What's happened?" Alex asked sounding alarmed and rising as though frightened.

"Nothing yet," Mabel said. "I just wanted to make sure I could identify you so when the twins come you'll be the first to know. Second, counting the doctor."

"How—how's my wife?" Alex asked, almost collapsing.

"Wanda will be fine," Mabel said. "But if you need to go out for any reason, be sure to tell the nurse at the station where you'll be and how you can be reached."

Alex held up a little rectangular gizmo. "I've got the pager."

"Be sure to take it with you," Mabel said smoothly. She turned to Stan with a bright smile. "And you're the grandfather!"

"Uncle," Stan corrected. "Grandpop's runnin' late, as usual. I'm Stanford Pines, hon. You're kinda young to be a nurse, arent' you?"

"That's why I'm just an aide," Mabel said. "Oh, this is Chris—"

"Mark!" Dipper corrected hastily. "I'm Mark."

"Sorry, I forgot. He's new," Mabel said to the Pines men. "Mark will be glad to bring you anything you want—coffee, tea, soft drinks, snacks. Have you had breakfast?"

Alex shook his head. "My wife went into labor about four-thirty. I rushed her straight here. But—"

"Mark, see what these gentlemen would like for breakfast and bring them a tray. I'll be around if you need anything else. And don't worry, Mr. Pines. Your babies will be fine, and so will your wife."

"Thank you."

Mabel made her fingers into an imaginary gun and shot Stan with a double click of her tongue. "I'll see you later!" Then she flounced out with a sassy spring in her step.

Stan nudged Alex. "Notice how charmed she was with me? I still got it!" he said. "Hey, you s'pose I should ask that little honey out? I dunno, somethin' about her—I like her on sight!"

"Uncle Stanford, she can't be more than eighteen. At the most. Uh, Mark—" Alex squinted. "Mark . . . O'Medisin?"

"What kind of name is that?" Stan asked. "French?"

"Irish," Dipper said. "Uh, may I bring you something to eat?"

"I could stand a nosh," Stan said. "Most of all, though, coffee. Black, two sugars. Then, whatever ya got that ain't sweet. Gives me gas if I eat sweet stuff too early. Alex, whattaya want?"

Alex said, "I think I'm too nervous—maybe coffee and a roll of some kind? Or a doughnut?"

"You need money, kid?"

"Uh, no, it's on the house. I'll be right back," Dipper said. He went out of the waiting room and leaned against the wall. _Where the heck do you get food in a hospital?_ He walked down to the nurses' station, and a middle-aged woman looked up from her computer. Huh, a clunky CRT monitor, orange letters on a black screen.

"Uh," Dipper began.

"I know, you're Mark and you're new," the woman said impatiently. "Florrie told me you might ask a few questions. Food? There's a serving room down that hall all the way to the end and on the left. Anything else?"

"No, thanks," Dipper said. "Uh—has Florrie worked here long?"

"Oh, she and I are old friends," the woman said, going back to her keyboarding.

 _How does Mabel do it?_

He found the small food-service room, got two cardboard cups of coffee, dumped two sugars in one, and glugged a little two-percent milk in the other, and capped them. The server on the line made Grunkle Stan a scrambled-egg-and-cheese sandwich on challah bread and put it and a fresh doughnut on two paper plates. Dipper trayed the food and paused at the cash register. "For guests in the maternity waiting room," he said.

"Give you the employee discount," the guy said, and he rang it up. "Five dollars thirty cents."

Dipper reached into his pocket. "Five dollars and thirty cents," he repeated. He pulled out his hand and paid with exact change.

He almost got lost finding his way back to the waiting room, but he saw Mabel ahead at an intersection, and she beckoned him. "Where'd you go?"

"Hey, you were the one who said I'd get them food!"

"It's this way. Dip, I just saw our granddad! He 's all frail and skinny-looking. I've only ever seen pictures before. I guess he's already pretty sick."

"Yeah, he didn't live long after we were born," Dipper said, balancing the tray.

She at least held the waiting-room door for him without going in herself. He handed the coffees out first and then said, "Mr. Stanford Pines, scrambled egg and cheese. Mr. Alex, doughnut."

"Thanks, kid," Stan said. "Hey, let me give you a tip."

"We can't accept them, sir," Dipper said quickly. He didn't know if on this journey picking up contemporary stuff was acceptable.

Stan took a long drink of coffee and started to gobble the sandwich. Alex took one absent-minded sip from his cup. "Is this cream?" he asked.

"Two per cent," Dipper said.

"Oh. That's what I always—uh, thanks. Did I tell you that? I don't remember."

"I think you did," Dipper said, starting to sweat a little.

Mabel had ducked out, but she opened the door and came in. "It should be only a few more minutes," she said. "If you'd like to be present at the birth, I'll take the father in. Mr. Stanford, you can watch from the delivery room observation post. Mr. Sherman Pines is there already."

Both men jumped up. "First," Mabel said sternly, "both of you go in there and wash your hands! Use soap and lather for at least twenty seconds!"

They meekly went into the washroom. Hastily, Mabel turned to Dipper. "I checked and it's OK. Dad can go in the room, Stan will wait with his brother in this sort of glassed-in booth. When they can hold the babies, they'll have to put on scrubs and masks. Where's the doodad we're supposed to find?"

"I think it's on Grunkle Stan," Dipper said.

The two men came out, and he asked, "Should I keep your food here?"

Stan grabbed the coffee cup and downed almost all of it, but passed on the half sandwich that was left. "Nah, dump it, but thanks!" he said. "Come on, Alex, and if ya faint, I'll pick you up again."

Before following them out, Mabel snagged and engulfed her dad's untouched doughnut.

Dipper trashed the coffee cups and half sandwich and then trailed them down the hall. He passed a rolling table with a stack of clipboards on it and grabbed one clipboard with a blank form on it—"Linen Check," it said. Pretending to study it, he followed Mabel, Stanley and Alex through another double door and to a dressing room.

Under her direction, Alex got into scrubs and even a cap for his long hair, and then Mabel ushered him into the delivery room. "You gentlemen can go in here," she said, opening a door that led into a very small room with one glass wall. Dipper glimpsed his grandfather, Sherman Pines, already there, leaning on a cane. Though he was years younger than Stan, he was emaciated and looked like a shaky old guy. He greeted his big brother as Mabel closed the door.

"Whoo!" she said. "Shermie told me that Grandma is squeamish about hospitals. She's gonna come and see Mom after we're born—which should be any second now. Come on, I found a way to spy."

"I'm . . . not sure I'm ready for this," Dipper said.

"It's only a TV monitor, and the camera's over the head of the bed looking toward the foot. You can't really see anything you shouldn't! Come on!"

She led him to another small booth, where six TV monitors showed six different labor rooms, only one of which was in use. The black-and-white picture showed a woman, covered by a sheet, with her feet up in stirrups. A nurse and doctor were attending her. "See," Mabel explained, "they tape everything so if something goes wrong, they have a record—oh, look, I just came out!"

Dipper felt woozy. Even in black and white, it was a bloody scene.

She chortled. "Did you see that? The doctor held me upside down by my feet, and I clocked him one with my fist! Attagirl, me!"

A nurse took the newborn to a waiting miniature gurney with a radiant heat lamp over it and began to clean her up. "About three more minutes," Mabel said. "Then it's your debut!"

"I think I'm gonna throw up," Dipper moaned.

She nudged him. "C'mon, Brobro! Be a mensch! How are you gonna stand it when Wendy starts popping out twins if—"

Dipper felt himself turning green. He didn't know how, but he did it. "Please!"

"Here comes the good part!"

Dipper didn't want to watch, but he couldn't take his eyes away. Then the moment came, the second twin was born— _That's me,_ he thought—and a flurry of frantic activity broke out. "Oh, my gosh! What's happening?"

"There's something wrong with you," Mabel said. "Oh, look, they're giving you oxygen! Wait, I think Grunkle Stan once told me when you were born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around your neck—oh, look at Dad! That's so sweet!"

Alex Pines was comforting his wife, hanging onto her hand, his forehead against hers. After a few more minutes, the doctor gave them a thumbs up. "I'm OK," Dipper said, relaxing. A few moments later, Mom was cradling both twins in her arms. Mabel tugged Dipper's sleeve. "Come on, Chris—"

"Mark!" he said.

"Chris, Mark, you think anybody's gonna remember? Let's go. They'll be shooing Grunkle Stan and Grandpop back to the waiting room until Mom and we get out of the recovery room. While we have time, we gotta grab whatever doohickey Blendin left with Stan."

They went back to the waiting room, where Sherman and Stanford were sitting on the sofa. Sherman looked shaky and gray; Stan was crying. "It was beautiful," he sobbed. "Shermie, you're the luckiest of us all."

"I don't know about that," their grandfather said in his quavering voice. "I'm pretty sick, Stanley. Why didn't Stanford come, too?"

"Uh, he's off on a secret government mission," Stanley said. "I'm, uh, coverin' for him while he's outa the country. Fact, I let Alex and Wanda think I'm him. Alex hasn't seen us since he was a toddler, he don't remember Ford's weird hands. Don't let on. It's a matter of national security."

"I don't understand," Sherman complained.

"Just go with it." At that moment, Stanley noticed that the twins had come in behind them. "How they doin', Florence?"

"Mother and twins are fine," she said.

"What happened with the boy?" Sherman asked.

"Oh, a little accident with the umbilical cord. That's why he looked blue. It happens a lot. The doctor administered oxygen, and babies bounce back quick. In a little while Mrs. Pines and her twins will be out of the recovery room and into a regular hospital room. Are you going to see her?"

"Yeah," Stanley said. "Shermie, you better go get Monica. She'll want to see her grandbabies, now that the shouting is over."

Sherman Pines rose, leaning heavily on his cane. "I'll be back in an hour," he said.

"That should be about right," Mabel said. Her voice sounded a little teary. "Goodbye, Mr. Pines. It was good to meet you."

And Dipper, his throat tight, his eyes watery, shook the hand of the grandfather he couldn't remember.

When his brother had gone, Stan said, "Shermie's a great guy. Shame he got so sick. It don't look good for him, I'm afraid. Well, him and me will arm-wrestle to hold the babies. I may even let him win, just so's he'll feel better."

"Mr. Pines," Mabel said, "While you were in the observation booth, instruments indicated that you have something on you that you can't take into Mrs. Pines's room. Would you empty your pockets so Mark can scan your possessions? We'll need to isolate whatever it is that's giving a low radioactive reading."

Stan stood up. "Sure, hon, I—wait, what? _Radioactive_? You serious?"

Dipper said, "I've got a hand monitor here. If you do have anything dangerous, I can identify it. We'll, uh, isolate it until after your visit."

"Geeze Louise!" Stan said. He rapidly put everything in his pockets on an end table: a deck of cards, a handful of change, his wallet, his keys, a blue marble—

The screen of Blendin's detector device flared red and pulsed. "This is it," Dipper said. "Where did you get this?"

"Found it a couple days ago at my bro—my house up in Oregon," Stan said. "It's a marble, for cryin' out loud!"

"No, it's got some radioactive properties. The signal's not strong. How long have you been carrying it? A couple of days? It hasn't had time to affect you, but it could be dangerous long-term," Dipper said. "For now, I'll take it and put it in a lead box, and then you can—"

"Lead? Like where Superman keeps his kryptonite?" Stan swallowed hard. "Uh, look, kid, just hang onto it, OK? It's a souvenir or some deal. I won't miss it, I just thought it was kinda pretty. Thought I'd give it to Wanda's baby—babies now, I guess. But if it's hot—nah, just take it. Hospital can dispose of it, right?"

Dipper said, "Sure. I have a small containment box in my pocket," and of course as soon as he said that, he did. He carefully placed the marble inside and closed the little metal box.

"Mr. Pines, you just stay put for a little while now," Mabel said. "A nurse will come and take you to the room just as soon as possible."

"Thanks," Stan said in a mildly stunned voice.

"Oh," Dipper added, "if you're still hungry—" he gave him directions to the little food-service room.

"Thanks, uh, Mark," Stan said. He laughed. "Sheesh! I dunno why I feel weak in the knees. I keep thinkin' if I'd been like Shermie I coulda had grandkids of my own. Too late for me now, though."

Mabel patted his arm. "Oh, Mr. Pines," she said affectionately, "it's never too late."


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7: Rigged Blue Marble**

 **(?)**

* * *

"Here we are again," Mabel complained. "How'd we get back? What's the deal? Did you push a button?"

"I didn't push anything," Dipper said. "We just walked out of the hospital and into this room. Again."

It was the bare cubicle, nowhere, nowhen. Their hospital disguises had vanished, and once again they wore the featureless jumpsuits. "I'm hungry," Mabel complained.

"You had a doughnut," Dipper pointed out. "That's more than I had."

"Yeah, but my metabolism runs higher than yours. Hey, room, can we have some room-service food?"

The calm voice—a lot like that computer in the movie 2001—said, "No, but I can alter the past so you will have already eaten. There. Is that better?"

Mabel burped and made a face. "What did I have? Tastes like pine needles."

"You both had an adequate serving of Soylent Purple. I anticipate your question, and the answer is no, it is not made of people or pigs. It is synthesized from natural plant substances and contains the minimum daily requirements for protein, fats, minerals, vitamins—"

"Everything but flavor, huh?" Mabel started to shift from foot to anxious foot. "Uh, how about a little girl's room? On the double!"

"I am incapable of materializing such things, but I will alter the past so neither of you requires such a facility. There."

"You take all the fun out of it," Mabel grumbled, though she stopped doing the potty two-step.

"OK, now that's taken care of," Dipper said, sitting down in a corner. "What is this?" he held up the small blue marble they had taken from Stan.

"That is a sphere of undetermined composition, weighing 60.1 grams and measuring 35 millimeters in diameter. It is chemically inert and is not radioactive."

"Oh. So it's a sphere. Thanks so much," Dipper said.

"Your sarcasm is noted."

"He's good," Mabel said.

"It's a wall, Mabel! It doesn't have sex," Dipper snapped.

Mabel chortled. "Oh, so it's just like you, huh? Zing!"

"It looks like a marble," Dipper mused, pointedly ignoring his sister's remark. He bounced it on his palm. "It doesn't feel like one, though. Don't think it's glass. Or plastic, either. Is it transparent?" He held it up to his eye.

And immediately saw everything shaded a deep blue. Except for the symbols, which glowed white. "Ah-hah!"

"What ah-ha?" Mabel asked.

"It's . . . like a viewer. Looking through it I can see a cipher projected on the wall. Get my notebook out of my pocket. No, other pocket. And the pen. OK, I'll call out the numbers and you write them down. Be sure to put dashes on both sides of each number. Oh, and when I get to a word break, I'll say 'slash,' and you put in a slash mark. Ready?"

Mabel clicked the pen. "Oh, I'm so ready!"

"Here we go."

And deliberately and clearly he read,

* * *

-18-21-/-2-12-6-/-19-26-5-22-/-13-12-7-/-9-22-24-22-18-5-22-23-/-14-2-/-15-22-7-7-22-9-/-18-/-26-14-/-8-7-26-2-18-13-20-/-18-13-/-16-26-13-8-26-8-/-1883-

-18-21-/-7-19-22-/-7-18-14-22-/-11-26-9-26-23-12-3/-26-5-12-18-23-26-13-24-22-/-22-13-21-12-9-24-22-14-22-13-7-/-8-10-6-26-23-/-18-8-/-26-21-7-22-9-/-14-22-/-8-7-12-11-/-19-22-9-22-/-26-13-23-/-20-12-/-25-26-24-16-

-18-21-/-7-19-22-/-24-12-26-8-7-/-18-8-/-24-15-22-26-9-/-20-12-/-21-12-9-4-26-9-23-

-2-12-6-/-19-26-5-22-/-11-26-8-8-22-23-/-7-19-22-/-15-18-21-22-/-22-5-22-13-7-/-19-12-9-18-1-12-13-

-21-9-12-14-/-19-22-9-22-/-12-13-/-7-26-16-22-/-13-12-7-19-18-13-20-/-25-6-7-/-14-22-14-12-9-18-22-8-/-26-13-23-/-23-12-/-13-12-7-/-24-19-26-13-20-22-/-7-19-22-/-14-26-17-12-9-/-22-5-22-13-7-8-/-12-21-/-19-18-8-7-12-9-2-

-21-26-18-15-18-13-20-/-7-12-/-23-12-/-7-19-18-8-/-14-26-2-/-24-26-6-8-22-/-22-9-26-8-6-9-22-/-21-9-12-14-/-7-18-14-22-

-2-12-6-9-/-13-22-3-7-/-20-12-26-15-/-18-8-/-11-26-15-12-/-26-15-7-12-/-24-26-15-18-21-12-9-13-18-26-/-26-6-20-6-8-7-/-7-4-22-15-7-21-7-19-/-1981-

-21-18-13-23-/-21-18-23-23-15-22-21-12-9-23-/-14-24-20-6-24-16-22-7-/-26-13-23-/-26-8-16-/-19-18-14-/-7-12-/-24-26-15-24-6-15-26-7-22-/-11-18-/-7-12-/-12-13-22-/-7-19-12-6-8-26-13-23-/-23-22-24-18-14-26-15-/-11-15-26-24-22-8-

-7-19-22-13-/-8-7-26-13-23-/-25-26-24-16-

-25-15-22-13-23-18-13-

* * *

When he finished, Mabel moved the pen from her left hand to her right and shook the one she had written with. "Carpal tunnel! That was like _War and Peace,_ the numbers edition."

"You could have shifted hands," Dipper murmured, taking the pad from her. "We're both ambidextrous."

"Pretty sure I'm not," Mabel said. "Pacifica doesn't turn me on, the way Mermando does you—"

"Means using both hands, Mabel!" Dipper growled.

"Ha! Gotcha, Broseph! OK, OK, time to serious up." Mabel peered down at the pad he was studying and handed the pen back to Dipper, who started to click it. "So now we have to guess the key word again, huh?"

Dipper tapped his finger on the last word. "I . . . don't think so. I think this one is simpler. No key word, just a little trick. Let me do some counting and if what I think he did is true, we should be on our way in about ten minutes."

"OK," Mabel said, sitting cross-legged on the floor and leaning against the featureless wall. "You do that. I'll amuse myself with a few soylent belches."


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8: Small Hadron Collision**

 **(Palo Alto, California: Wednesday, August 12, 1981)**

* * *

"This," said Mabel, "looks a whole lot like home."

It did, too—a sky just turning blue with a dawning day, a cool morning breeze faintly scented with ocean salt, and twittering birds raising a racket. The trees even looked familiar.

"Pretty close. It's Palo Alto," Dipper told her, craning his neck to look around. "Just across Dumbarton Bridge from Fremont. But where are we supposed to find McGucket?"

"Muh-oh oh," Mabel said with a shrug—her verbal shorthand for "I don't know."

"Think, think, think," Dipper told himself. "First of all, where are we? I mean where in Palo Alto."

"There's some stores up ahead," Mabel said. "We can ask there."

"I think it's too early in the morning for any of them to be open," Dipper said. "Can't be much past seven in the morning. But I suppose it's better than nothing."

The small shopping area was only a five-minute walk. "Hey," Mabel said, perking up and pointing at a big yellow neon M sign, "there's a MacDougal's! Let's go get some breakfast!"

"I don't even know if they served breakfast back then," Dipper said.

But they did. The Egg McDoodle was on the menu, anyway, and Dipper bought three, one for himself, two for Mabel, along with two not-very-good coffees. The usual miracle occurred, and found in his pocket the exact amount of the purchase (no doubt in period-correct bills and coins, too). He and Mabel sat at a table near the front window and ate their breakfast while watching the streets begin to teem with traffic.

Clothing styles hadn't changed that much—not for Dipper, anyway. He found himself in jeans, tan suede shoes ("House Puppies!" Mabel said), and a red shirt. Mabel was in a sleeveless blue top, a knee-length white skirt, and rainbow-stripped leggings. Her verdict on herself was "Pretty cool!"

"Hey, I have an idea," Dipper said as they tossed their wrappers and left the burger place. "Come on!"

He led the way to the little shopping strip, where no sores were yet open, but on the sidewalk outside the row of shops he saw—yes! There stood an aluminum and glass booth. "Pay phone!" he said.

"I don't think I know what that is," Mabel muttered.

They entered the booth—"Smells like pee!" Mabel complained—and Dipper found the phone book, in heavy covers and bolted to the booth wall. It swiveled up and then opened.

"Here we go!" he said, turning to the M's.

"What is that?" Mabel asked.

"It's a telephone directory," Dipper said. "It's got the names of everybody who has a telephone in the whole town."

"No way!"

"MacGodfrey, McGossum, ah-ha! McGucket, F. H. Let's see . . . 1575 Columbus Avenue. Here, I'll need, uh—a dime? I guess a dime."

He picked up the receiver—wow, so heavy—and then reached in his pocket, found the coin, and dropped it in the slot where it jangled for a second before the dial tone cut in. For a moment the dial itself flummoxed him, but he and Wendy had seen lots of old movies with phones in them, and he said, "Huh. You really did dial a phone!"

Mabel watched in fascination as the dial went round and then clicked back into place. "That is totes gooch!" she said. "I want a cell phone that does that."

"No, trust me, you don't. This thing weighs a ton. Shh!"

Her silence was unnecessary. A siren-like error tone sounded and then a recorded voice said, "We're sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service."

Dipper hung up the phone and the machine jingled and clattered. Mabel opened the coin return, but Dipper said, "Leave it. We're not supposed to take anything with us."

"It must've melted anyway," Mabel said. "Slot's empty."

Dipper wrote the address in his notebook. "Let's see where this place is."

They asked a traffic cop, who mentioned a couple of streets pointed them vaguely to the west, and they slogged down Escondido as the day grew hotter. They passed an elementary school and then came to a major intersection. "This is Stanford," Mabel said, peering at the street sign. "The policeman said turn right here, didn't he?"

"Yeah, shouldn't be too much further. Come on."

They passed Dartmouth and then came to Columbia Avenue. It had to be a left turn—Columbia dead-ended into Stanford. "I wonder if they named it after Grunkle Stan," Mabel said.

"No, I think it was probably Leland Stanford, who founded—wait, this is 1595 on the left, so McGucket's house should be—huh! Looks like a party."

It wasn't a party, but a garage sale. Six cars parked in its driveway and at the curb. The house was a modest little place, yellow stucco, one story, with an open garage. The scanty lawn held a SOLD sign, and seven or eight people were busy hauling stuff to their cars. "There's Fiddleford!" Dipper said. "Just like he looked in Grunkle Stanford's college yearbook!"

"And the memory player, too," Mabel said.

The lean, bookish-looking man, wearing tan pants, brown shoes, and a white shirt, was helping a woman load a folding treadmill in the back of a pickup. "Hope you get lots of use out of that, now!" he said cheerfully. He had brown hair worn long, shoulder-length. He went back to a table where a trim, attractive young woman sat, counting bills into a cash box, and handed her more bills—

"That's Mayellen!" Mabel said. "She looks so young!"

"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "Fiddleford met her in Gravity Falls. Why is she even here? Oh my gosh, look at that table inside the garage!"

It was a kitchen table, made of aluminum tube legs and a Formica top, and had seen better days. Arrayed on it were five clunky-looking laptops.

"Howdy!" Fiddleford said as they approached. "Look around and make an offer on anything that catches your eye. We're moving permanently to Oregon next Monday, and everything must go!"

"Oregon?" Dipper asked. "Uh, where in Oregon? I—we come from those parts."

Fiddleford chuckled. "Oh, you won't have heard of this place. I got a temporary job there last summer, but now it's turned into a full-time position, so my wife and I are pulling up stakes."

"Are those computers?" Dipper asked, pointing.

"Sure as I'm standing here! This used to be McGucket's Computermajigs, custom-built. I call these here portamacarry machines. You can pick 'em up, fold 'em like a briefcase, and tote 'em near about anywhere. Work on transformers or rechargeable batteries! Gotta warn you, though, when they start to wear out, you can't replace them. But they're goin' cheap, four hundred bucks and take one away!"

"Could we look at them?" Dipper asked.

"Why, sure you can! Go right ahead. 'Scuse me, this lady's looking at a set of encyclopedias."

Nobody else seemed interested in the computers, and Mabel and Dipper poked around alone in the garage. "I think I see what happened," Mabel said. "Grunkle Ford called McGucket to come and help him, he went to Oregon, met Mayellen and married her, and then they decided to move up there permanently."

"You don't know that," Dipper said. "Huh, one of these is probably _the_ laptop. They all look alike, though."

"McGucket Labs," Mabel said, reading a label. "Grunkle Ford told me that for a while there McGucket was in competition with what's his name, Jobs and that guy whose name I never can remember—"

"Jobs and Wozniak," Dipper said.

"Now you listen here to me," McGucket said from right behind Dipper. "I never had any truck with them two scamps! Oh, they devised a far-out little machine, all right, but did you know they got their start with phone freaking?"

"Uh—no," Dipper said. He didn't know what that was, but it sounded sinister.

"True word, they did. And I never cheated anybody out of dimes in my whole life," Fiddleford said. "Oh, by the way, I'm the McGucket of McGucket labs. Name's Fiddleford."

Dipper widened his eyes. "Not Fiddleford Hadron McGucket!" he said.

Fiddleford blinked. "Uh—why, yes. Yes, that's me. You—heard of me?"

"You designed and built these laptops!" Dipper said. "It's an honor to meet you!"

"Why thank you, but—what? Lap-whats? These here are portamacarries, uh—I don't know your name."

"It's Chris," Mabel said helpfully. "Chris Diaz."

"And this is my sister," Dipper said with a glare at her. "Her name's Bonana Diaz."

"Chiquita Bonana Diaz!" Mabel said. "But you can call me 'Chicky.'"

"I'm sorry," Dipper said. "See, I have relatives in the computer business myself, and, uh, they're trying to create a, uh, a light-weight computer that operates on rechargeable batteries, sort of this same idea. They haven't succeeded, but they call the idea a laptop. Because you can put the computer on top of your lap."

"Or your head!" Mabel said. "If you've got long arms and are a touch typist."

"Laptop," Fiddleford mused. "Lap . . . top. . . nah, I don't think that's catchy enough."

Mabel picked up a book that lay on the corner of the table, past the computers. "Hey!" she said. "Lookie here, Charlie! A yearbook from Backuspmore! Is this for sale?"

Fiddleford snapped out of his reverie. "Huh? Uh, no, sorry, that there's my personal yearbook. I pulled it out of a box of books we're sellin', Mayellen—oh, that's my wife, Mayellen—and me. I set it in here so it wouldn't get sold. How do you even know about Backuspmore?"

"We have relatives in New Jersey," Dipper said, frowning in Mabel's direction and shaking his head.

"One of them went to Backupsmore!" Mabel said.

"Yes," Dipper put in hastily. He stressed his words: "But he was there _a long time back_. He's our great-uncle, so it probably would have been before your time."

"Say," Mabel chirped, "have you invented that mind-control tie they use for President Reagan yet—"

"Zip it," Dipper muttered.

Fiddleford stared at her with wide eyes. "How did you know about—I mean, I have no idea what you mean. I mean, uh—'scuse me." He turned around and hauled down the garage door, closing it with a clatter. Then, looking upset, he said, "How'd you kids even hear that I did some work for the—shoot, I nearly said it! For the, uh, campaign?"

Dipper sighed. "OK, we'll come clean. You worked for an Agency headed by—we won't mention his name, but he was once a professor at Backupsmore. On the side, he advised an official Agency, which specializes in, well, let's say specialized knowledge."

"For specialized purposes," Mabel said. "Wink, wink!"

"But how do you—are you spies?"

" _Whaaat_?" Mabel asked. "Come on, Doc! I'm too _cute_ to be a spy!" She put her index fingers against her cheeks and gave him her most winning smile.

"Not spies! Just . . . observers," Dipper said, frantically improvising. "We, ah, travel to different dimensions and, uh, observe. For example, we know that you're working in Gravity Falls as the assistant of a man named Dr. Pines."

"Watch out for the Gnomes," Mabel warned. "They'll drive you crazy."

"We're not here to stop you," Dipper said hastily. "Just to observe. Like I said."

"Different dimensions?" Fiddleford asked. He tried to laugh, but it sounded all hollow. "Now, that's impossible! I mean, maybe it's _theoretically_ feasible, but you'd need technology far more advanced than anything we got!"

"But maybe not beyond the reach of a couple of researchers," Mabel said. "If you know what I mean."

"We know you're using advanced technology from a crashed flying saucer," Dipper said. "We don't care. It doesn't matter to us at all. We're simply observers."

"I . . . I think maybe I ought to call the authorities," Fiddleford said, reaching for a dial phone on the desk.

"That won't work," Dipper told him.

Fiddleford held the receiver to his ear and turned pale. "Dead! What did you do to it?"

"Nothing," Dipper said. "You just had it disconnected. Because you're moving next week."

"Oh, yeah, that's right." Fiddleford hung up and scratched his head. "Sellin' the house here and movin' permanently to . . . I'm having some short-term memory lags on account of—never mind."

"You shouldn't have looked into the Gremloblin's eyes," Dipper said. "That messes a man up."

"The what?"

"Never mind," Dipper said. "You wouldn't remember it now, but you'll find out one of these days. Listen, Dr. McGucket, my sister and I—"

"We're Chet and Banana!" Mabel added helpfully.

Wondering what MacDougal's put into their breakfast sandwiches, Dipper said, "She's joking. We're Chris and Bonana. Anyway, we simply want to check out how advanced your portamathingy computers are. Just for our records. We mean you no harm and we'll leave you in peace as soon as we get the information we need. Let us see one in action, and we'll leave and you won't ever hear from us again."

"Not until the summer of 2012, anyways," Mabel said. "Oh, by the way, think about what happens to all computers everywhere when the clock turns over from midnight, December 31, 1999, and it's suddenly 2000."

"I don't understand that at all," Fiddleford said, his voice cracking with anxiety. "It's just th' turnin' of—oh, no. Wait a minute. The computer clocks will all crash!"

"But now you've got time to figure out a fix," Mabel said cheerfully.

Impatiently, Dipper had switched on one of the laptops. It took it a long while to fire up—but then he said, "It's asking for a password, Dr. McGucket."

But Fiddleford was still stuck on the Y2K problem, something he obviously had not considered before. "Problem is the digital register of the year in all the software. Huh! Programmers saved space by just countin' the last two digits—but when the clock turns from 99 to 00, the computer'll think it's 1900 and freeze up tighter'n a duck on a Yukon pond in February!"

"There's the McGucket we know!" Mabel said. "Come on, don't freak out. Remember, you've got nearly twenty years to solve it."

Fiddleford flipped the piece of paper that had the computer price on it—$400 AS IS—and started to scribble. "Thing is, gotta come up with an algorithm—"

"What's the password?" Dipper asked.

"—that will correct the registry—password? Just my name, McGucket. Whoever buys a computermajig then gets to change it to whatever. If I set the parameters—"

Dipper slapped his forehead. "McGucket! Of course." He hurriedly typed in McGucket, and the screen flashed "WELCOME" in green.

"Uh, how do I get it to calculate pi?" Dipper asked.

"Here, you just—" Fiddleford's fingers flickered on the keyboard—"there. Now just keyboard in the number of digits you want. Don't just hit return, or she'll try to go infinite and freeze up on you, though."

"You might want to stand away," Dipper said, and absent-mindedly, Fiddleford wandered off eight or ten steps, still calculating. "Mabel, hold my hand."

She held his left, and with his right forefinger he entered 1000. And then hit Return.

And said, "Jump ba—"

The screen displayed the result of the calculation and then flashed WARNING DIVERSION TO ALTERNATE TIMELINE.

And Dipper finished saying "back" and the whole universe turned inside out.

Or that's what it felt like.

"Where's our next clue?" Mabel asked.

"I . . . don't know. But look over there."

"Wow," Mabel said. "I always wanted to visit Washington!"

Because it was the middle of a muggy night. And they were staring at the dome of the U.S. Capitol, not very far away.

And men in police uniforms were coming toward them.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9: Crossing the Line**

 **(Washington D.C., July 24, 1974)**

* * *

A harsh, Southern-accented voice cut through the night: "Stop right where you are! Hands on top of your heads!"

Flashlights stabbed into their faces. Mabel tugged his sleeve. "Dipper, what'll we do?"

"Stand still and put your hands on your head, like this," he said, and she followed his action.

Six policemen, none of them looking like a cheerful neighborhood cop, surrounded them. "Protesters, huh?" one of them said. He was toying with a nightstick, tapping it into his palm.

"Protest? Protesters?—no!" Dipper protested.

"We're just sightseeing," Mabel said in her singsongy, ingratiating voice. "By the way, I'm a Congressperson. You guys are doing a heck of a job keeping law and order and that kind of stuff."

The lights swung away from Dipper and focused on her face. "Uh—" one of the cops said. "I think this is the Schuyler woman."

"Too young," a second one said.

"She's supposed to be at the hearing, Sarge," a third one put in. "She should be getting there right now."

"Who's this?" The flashlight beam hit Dipper again.

"An aide!" Mabel said. "Can't you tell a lowly aide when you see one? Come on, Officers, let us pass. This is a Federal case!"

"Be on your way, but stick to the sidewalk," the head cop growled. "Anybody prowling around near the Capitol on the grass, we arrest!"

As Dipper and Mabel made their way to the pavement, one of the cops called, "Hey, lady? Vote to impeach the bastard!"

"Kowalksi!" bellowed the sergeant.

"When are we?" Mabel asked. "Huh. I'm kinda in a pink jacket-and-skirt ensemble, with this horrible lacey blouse underneath. Awful outfit, but I make it look good. You look like Mr. Mystery, black suit and white shirt but with a fat red, white, and blue tie. And you can't pull off a buzz cut, Broman!"

"You're disguised, too," Dipper said. "I mean your features. You look sort of like yourself, but a little older, I think, and your face is a different shape. Who did the cop think you were?"

"Skyler? Something like that."

Sirens tore into the night off in the distance. "Fire engines," Dipper said. "Hm. The finder device isn't showing anything. Maybe we'd better get out of here until we can figure this out." They walked rapidly away from the Capitol along Delaware until they reached Columbus Circle, where Dipper successfully flagged down a taxi.

"Where to?" the cabby asked.

"Uh, find us a hotel. Preferably one that has vacancies," Dipper said.

"Ask for something hard next time," the cabby muttered in a grumpy voice, but he pulled into traffic. "So you guys in town for the impeachment hearings?"

"No," Dipper said. "just sight-seeing."

"Yeah, gonna be some sights to see. You come back in the morning and see some of these pinkos get their brains knocked out, am I right?"

"Nothing like pinko brains," Mabel said heartily.

"Hah!"

He dropped them off at, well, not the fanciest hotel in town, but one that did have a VACANCY sign lit up. Dipper paid him, tossing in a tip—the fare was not quite seven bucks the tip a little more than three, which earned him a hearty "Thanks, bud!"—and they entered the hotel.

"My sister and I need a room," Dipper told the desk clerk.

"Sister, huh?" the thin woman said sourly. Wrinkles from the corners of her nose drew her mouth down in a frown. "Better hit the road, sonny."

"I guess we have to prove who we are," Dipper said. "I have documentation here." He reached into his magic pocket, hoping for a miracle. He brought out two passports. The woman opened and glanced at them, looked harder at the black-and-white photos, and then blinked like a lizard on a too-hot rock.

"I'm sorry sir. I had no idea. Just a moment . . . here's a room with two twin beds. Is that acceptable?"

"Sure," Dipper said. He took the passports back and stole a glance to see who he was. "Uh, I'll pay cash in advance, if that's all right. We expect to leave early tomorrow morning, maybe before dawn."

"That will be thirty-one dollars and fifty cents," the clerk said.

His pocket supplied the money, Dipper forked it over and received a key in return. "Come on, Sis," he said. He paused. "Oh—our luggage may follow. It got misplaced at the airport. If it shows up after we check out, I'll leave a forwarding address."

They went up one floor and found the room halfway down a narrow corridor. "What was that all about?" Mabel asked.

"Dunno. But apparently I'm Quentin Kermit Roosevelt and you're Eleanor Susan Roosevelt."

"Kermit?" Mabel asked, sputtering as Dipper unlocked the door. " _Kermit?_ Hey, is it really all that hard to be green?"

"Get in," he said. "I think we're supposed to be somebody from Franklin Roosevelt's family."

"Or the Frog family," Mabel said, still giggling. "Oh, look, this'll do. Not what I'd call posh, but it'll do!"

The room had a mini-fridge and a nineteen-inch TV. Mabel searched fruitlessly for a remote control, but Dipper said, "I don't think they had them back then." He switched the set on, and it took a while to warm up.

When it came on—"Aw! Black and white!" Mabel complained—a newsman was saying, "The historic hearing concerning the question of impeaching President Richard M. Nixon will begin shortly. On your screen you see Barbara Jordan of Texas, and the young woman speaking to her is, I believe, Representative Ariel Schuyler of New York. When the hearing begins, Jordan is expected to vote for impeachment. . . ."

Mabel jumped off the foot of one of the beds, where she had settled, and knelt with her face inches from the screen. "Dipper, am I crazy, or—is that _me_?"

Jordan and the other woman stood in the background, and the small picture made it difficult to judge, but Dipper said, "It looks sort of like you look right now—maybe a little older—this is weird!"

The reporter was saying, "I've just been handed a note that Washington, DC emergency services are responding to a possible bombing and fire. For more on that breaking story, let's go back to the studio and anchorman Allenby Size. Allenby, are you there?"

"Holy jamoley," Mabel said, echoing one of Stan's phrases as she turned down the sound on the set. "This is like the middle of the 1970s! What am I _doing_ here over there?"

They heard voices in the corridor, and Dipper sat up straight. "That can't be—it sounds just like—" he went to the door and cracked it open. Mabel came over and stooped to peer through the crack.

The couple across the hall was opening their door. A young man and a young woman, the woman a red-head with the key, the young man rumpled and carrying a paper fast-food bag. And as soon as the woman turned the key, they went inside and shut the door behind them. The lock clicked.

"That's you and Wendy!" Mabel said. "But you're here! How can you be there? How can you be in two places at once? Is there food in that fridge over there?"

"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "McGucket's computer flashed a warning just before we got sent here. We've switched to an alternate time line. I wonder—we must be, like, carrying out a mission from Blendin in this time line. I mean the other us, the ones across the hall and you getting ready for some hearing. So—why did we get sent here? I mean, you're obviously posing as that Congresswoman, Schuyler, and Wendy and I are sharing a hotel room—"

"You finally got lucky, you profligate!" Mabel said, elbowing him in the ribs. "Seriously, I'm gonna check out that fridge."

While Dipper sat numbly on the foot of his bed, trying to process it all, she rifled through the refrigerator. "Man, look at these prices! Hmm . . . is a Knickers Bar worth a buck and a half? Decisions, decisions."

"Hang on!" Dipper said, reaching into his pocket. "That finder device is vibrating." He pulled it out. On the small screen he could read the message HERE in yellow letters. And then—a white stylized arrow, no feathers, no real arrowhead, just a pointy top—if the base of the arrow was over the HERE, as it seemed to be. The image blinked out, replaced by 32.49. The last numeral blinked down to zero, and then it was 32.39. "We've got a deadline!" Dipper said.

"For what?" Mabel was unwrapping the candy bar. "Leave a buck and a half on top of the fridge, I guess."

"I . . . don't know! And I don't know where, either." He told her about the puzzling message and image.

"An arrow? Mabel asked.

"Looked like one to me. Except no feathers. And not a, you know, classical arrowhead, just a point on the very end."

He rummaged through the hotel clutter of restaurant and other ads until he found a stylized map of the city. "Hmm. If we assume that HERE means this hotel, then the arrow would point north—I guess—but what's there, and where exactly would it be if it's on a line straight north of here?"

"Brobo," Mabel said. She had gone for the overpriced Knickers bar and was perched on the foot of her bed, kicking her feet, munching and staring at the TV. She had switched channels and had found one broadcasting in color, though the hotel TV set seemed to have a preference for shades of green. She jumped up and boosted the sound. "Broseph! Dipper! Look _right now_!"

An irritated Dipper glanced at her and then at the TV.

On the screen, a man with a distinguished mustache sat at a desk. He wore a wide-lapeled tweed jacket and a dark tie, to which a silvery microphone had been clipped. Behind him, slightly out of focus, Dipper could see what was either a poster or a giant projection image. " . . . how we came to this potential Constitutional crisis," the man was saying, "we need first to look back at what the framers intended."

"Don't you see it?" Mabel said, pointing dramatically at the backdrop behind the newscaster. " _There's_ your arrow!"

"The Washington Monument!" Dipper said. "Mabel, you're right! Come on! It's getting late, and we only have about thirty minutes!"

"Aw! I wanted to see that Congresswoman Schuyler's speech!"

Dipper opened the hotel room door. "Come on—we'll look it up online when we get home."

"If we ever do!" Mabel said, but she hopped off the bed and tossed down the last bite of chocolatey goodness. And peanuts and caramel. Ooh, and nougat. That was her favorite, next to the peanuts, caramel, and especially the chocolate.

The hotel doorman—it was a shabby hotel, but it did have a shabby, uniformed doorman—got them a cab, Dipper handed him a five-dollar bill, and they climbed in. "Washington Monument!" Dipper said.

The driver had an unplaceable accent: "Going to the vigil?"

"Yes!" Mabel said. "What's one of those?"

Dipper shushed her, and the cab screeched as it left the circle in front of the hotel. They made it to the Monument in a little more than twenty minutes, Dipper paid and overtipped, and they saw that even at close to 10 PM, plenty of people thronged the sidewalks. The Monument, brightly illuminated by floodlights, thrust its pale finger toward the dark sky.

Now the locater hummed. Dipper kept casting covert glances at it. "Six minutes left. This way."

A group of thirty or forty young people, teens their age and up to the early twenties, sat on the grass in a circle, each one holding a lighted candle. They were singing "Kumbaya" off-key. The locater led them around the edge of the circle.

Dark though it was, people swarmed, many brandishing placards, the messages ranging from IMPEACH to DIE COMMIE SCUM. The locater locked onto a skinny, scared-looking man in his twenties, threading his way through the crowd, cursing and shoving. He wore a torn sports jacket and had yanked his tie open. Or someone trying to catch him had torn the jacket and yanked the tie.

"Him," Dipper said. "It's him!"

They came at him from an angle, cut him off, and he pulled up short, scowling. Then he gasped and said, "You! It's you!"

"Me!" Dipper said. "What's your hurry?"

"Look, they're onto me," the other guy said, panic scaling his voice up into the tenor range. "Haig and his bunch. Here. Get this to him. Fast as you can, let him know—they're already moving!"

He took an envelope from his inner jacket pocket and thrust it into Dipper's hands. Behind him, a crowd of men in suits shoved their way toward him.

"Run," Dipper said. "Lead them away! Good luck!"

The young guy dived into the crowd, now really running for it, and one of the suits yelled, "I got him! There he goes!"

The pursuers flowed around Dipper and Mabel.

"Come on," Dipper said, grabbing her arm.

"What did he give you?"

"Envelope. Come on, let's see what we have here. Maybe it's the next clue. Another cipher, I'll bet."

They had to find a quiet spot, not easy in Washington on that hot, humid summer night in 1974 when the fate of the Nixon presidency hung in the balance.

Finally, at a bus stop, they found enough privacy to look and enough light to see. Mabel leaned against Dipper. "OK, so what's the big mystery?"

Dipper pulled the envelope from inside his pocket. It was a plain white business envelope, no engraving, no return address. "Huh!" he said. "Look at this!" He held it so she could see what passed for an address.

"Can't be him," Mabel said.

"Not ours, but—it says _Reverend_ _Gleeful, Eyes Only_." So it did, in a hasty ink scrawl.

Mabel glanced around, but no one was near them. She whispered, "We're not supposed to open it?"

"Obviously not."

"Good!" Mabel said, grabbing the envelope out of his hands and ripping it open. As she tore out the one sheet of paper it held and unfolded it—

Dipper glimpsed the blazing words REPAIRED TIME LINES DIVERGING not on the page, but burning in the air itself, and everything exploded in silver light. Darkness flooded in.

Then dawned the gray light of what looked like a rainy day.

And then, somehow, they found themselves in a drizzle, standing in a shop doorway on Oxford Street in London, and ahead of them, strolling toward a Tube station, were the four Beatles, all of them quite young.

Though Dipper had no idea who they were.

* * *

 _Author's note: For the backstory behind this chapter, check out "Dipper and Wendy's Doomsday Defense," by the talented AllenbysEyes._


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10: Day in the Life**

 **(London, November 26, 1962)**

* * *

However, Mabel recognized them immediately. And simultaneously with her delighted gasp, the locater began to vibrate. Dipper pulled it out and it read FOLLOW THE 4.

"Come on," Dipper said. "I think we're supposed to follow those four guys who just went into the subway station."

"It's the Beatles!" Mabel said excitedly. "One of Grunkle Ford's favorite bands! Grandmother Pines had all their albums on vinyl! What do we do here?"

It took a bit of doing, but by observing other passengers, Dipper latched onto the basic idea of how to pay the fares. They saw the four young men down the platform, apparently jamming, one of them tapping his foot, two of them singing softly. As they approached, one of the singers said, "Yeh, just like that. That's how we'll do it."

A train rolled in, and Dipper and Mabel followed them into an uncrowded compartment. The four were talking as the train started forward again. The one with the prominent nose seemed a little nervous, because he was fiddling with something, but the others were at ease, and one of them smiled at the wide-eyed Mabel and said, "Hi."

"Oh, my gosh!" she said. "I know you guys! You're the Beatles!" She pointed. "Ringo! John! Paul! George!"

"That's us," the guy who had said "hi"—it was Paul—replied, laughing.

Ringo said, "Ta for giving me top billing! I'm always the least."

"Last, but not least," John said.

"Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited to meet you guys!" Mabel said. "I love your music!"

"Do you now?" Paul asked. "You mean you've heard us play? What's your name, luv?"

"Michelle!" Mabel exclaimed. "This is my twin brother, Chester!"

"You're a Yank, are you?" John asked. "How do you know us, then?"

"I'm, uh, French!" Mabel insisted. "Uh, ooh la la! Je t'adore! Ou est la plume de ma tante? Tres bien, n'est-ce pas?"

"We're American," Dipper said firmly. "She's just kidding. And our names aren't Chester and Michelle, either!"

"Oh, well, Yanks are cool too," Ringo said, smiling.

"Merci!" Mabel said, still on her French kick. Dipper nudged her. "Oh, fine! I've got a boring old name, Mabel, really."

Dipper grimaced—but then, this far back in history, he reflected, they probably wouldn't cause any stir by using their own names.

"But that's French as well, isn't it?" Paul asked. "Mabel, ma belle—my beauty, that means."

"Yes!" Mabel said with an air punch. "Michelle ma belle! That's me, all right!"

"Are you guys heading to a performance?" Dipper asked, trying to see what the drummer was twirling in his fingers.

"Recording," George said. "Trying to get it right this time."

"Yeh, that's my fault," Ringo said. "Our first try, they even took me off the drums, right, and put me on the bleedin' marimbas! I'm the new guy in the group, just joined in August."

"Where did you hear us?" John asked. "We're not exactly world famous, are we?"

"We are in Germany," Paul said.

John chuckled. "Yeh, world-famous in Germany, give you that one, mate!"

"I don't remember where—" Dipper began.

But Mabel piped up: "Liverpool! That's where! The Cavern!"

"Really?" Paul asked, looking bemused. "Last month, was that?"

Dipper started to speak, but Mabel shot him an I-got-this look. "August!" she said.

Ringo stopped twirling the little doodad he held in his fingers, and Dipper caught his breath. "Yeh," Ringo said. "They didn't like me so well. They started chanting 'Pete Forever, Ringo Never.'"

"'Cause our drummer Pete Best had just left," John said.

"Never mind," Mabel said. "You wound up with the best, anyhow!"

"Ooh," Ringo said. "I think I'm in love!"

"Uh—what have you got there?" Dipper asked.

"This? Dunno. Found it left in a hotel room. Looks like a whistle, but—" he blew into it—"if it is, it's a dud."

"Maybe dogs can hear it," Paul suggested.

"May I see it?"

"Sure." Ringo handed it over.

Dipper had been right in his first guess. It was, of all things, a usb memory stick—but it was about forty years too early. The locater in his pocket was practically buzzing.

"Don't worry," Mabel assured Ringo. "This recording session, you're gonna nail it. I have a sixth sense about these things!"

"Do you, now?" he asked, his smile bright but a little self-conscious. "That's nice to hear, anyway."

"Our stop's coming up," Paul said. "We're for Abbey Road. Hey, Mabel, could we give you our autographs?"

"Ooh!" Mabel got the pocket notebook and ballpoint from Dipper and they all signed, John even adding a little sketch of Mabel with her grin.

"And you as well?" Ringo asked Dipper.

"Uh, could I keep this instead? It's a circuit tester, but it won't work with British electricity systems, and anyway, it's burned out. I, um, I'm interested in electronics."

"Oh, sure, I just kept it in me pocket to keep me fingers busy," Ringo said with a shrug.

"Better than having a hole in your pocket!" Mabel said.

The train stopped at St. John's Wood, the musicians got out, and Mabel said, "I can't believe it! I met the Beatles! If we could go to one of their concerts, I'd scream like anything!"

"This must be what we're supposed to find," Dipper said. "But—how do we read it?"

"I'm too excited to think! Let's get off and have some lunch somewhere!"

* * *

In point of fact, one small alteration occurred in the time line as a result of the chance meeting. Paul, intrigued by a record by Chet Atkins ("Trambone") in which he simultaneously picked a melody and strummed a bass line, noodled about with a tune, remembered the phrase "Michelle ma belle"—though regrettably his brief meeting on the Tube with Mabel had slipped his memory by that time—and he and John created a Beatles standard that should not have existed.

However, the TPAES eventually decided that since the song was lovely, and since its appearance sparked no wars, influenced no politics, and did not disturb the gravitational force of the Earth, it was one of those little quirks that was better left alone. The time line would heal itself quietly.

Which makes one wonder—did Mabel already know about the song when she impulsively named herself "Michelle?" And if so, how so, since previous to her visit it did not officially exist in her time line?

The TPAES devoted a whole day of debate to this topic. They finally reached the only conclusion possible.

"It's Mabel," Time Baby proclaimed. "What are you gonna do?"

* * *

Dipper and Mabel rode to the next Tube station, got off, got back on a southbound train, and when Dipper recognized the name of Baker Street Station as having something to do with Sherlock Holmes, they disembarked. The drizzle had intensified, and though both of them were wearing anoraks, the weather had turned chilly. Dipper bought a newspaper and they found a little café tucked away down a short street. Its offerings were limited, but they had coffee and pastries and sat at a little round table away from the few other guests.

"Too early for teatime, I guess," Dipper said. He looked at the front page of his paper. "Huh. OK, today is Monday, November 26, 1962."

"Who's de Gaulle?" Mabel asked around a mouthful of strawberry tart as she eyed the front page. "Oh, wait! Snap! Wow, the Beatles were going to the Abbey Road studio to record 'Please Please Me!' The producer told them they'd just recorded their first number one hit!"

"How do you know all this?" Dipper asked.

"Because when Grandma Pines moved to Florida, she left all her Beatles records with Dad! He put them on digital files for me, remember? Our eleventh birthday?"

"I'd forgotten," Dipper said. "Wait a minute—this isn't your memory stick, is it? You didn't get a time tape from Blendin and come back—"

"Of course not!" Mabel said. "Not yet, anyway. I wouldn't have thought of it. Anyway, I became a Beatles expert!"

"Wait. What do you mean 'not yet?'"

"Don't we have more serious things to think of?"

"OK," Dipper said, twirling the usb stick in his fingers. "There's no tech available to read this. What if the next clue, or cipher, or whatever, is on this? I'm no Fiddleford. I couldn't, I don't know, invent a computer to read it. And I don't think my pocket's big enough to produce one, either."

"Is there a socket in the locater?"

"There's nothing in the locater," Dipper said. "Except it's flashing green, which tells us this is the thing we're meant to find, and, I guess, turn over to Blendin if we can ever get to him."

They finished, Dipper left a tip on the table, and they left the café, a waiter behind them calling out, "Oi! You forgot your money!"

Tipping customs are different in England.

They found a museum and went in just to get out of the rain. Mabel opened her coat and looked at herself. "Yes!" she said. "A Mary Quant!"

"A what in the who now?" Dipper asked.

"The outfit," she said, modeling. She was wearing a red dress, very short, with a broad shiny black belt over glittery stockings. "It's a Mary Quant mini-dress! Swinging Sixties, Brobro! Let's see what you have on."

It was a gray tweed jacket over black trousers, white shirt, narrow black tie. "Boring," he said.

"We can't all be fashionistas," Mabel said. "OK, what I suggest is we use the time zapper to travel back to the present, our present, read the usb with a computer—why are you shaking your head?"

"It won't work," Dipper said. "I already tried. We can't go forward in time, I think—jut back until we meet Blendin."

"Bummer," she said. "Did they say bummer back then?"

"I don't know," Dipper said, holding up the usb stick. "But how are we gonna read this thing?"

"Give it here."

"You can't read it."

"No," Mabel said. "But maybe Ringo had the right idea." She put the plug between her lips, like a whistle, and blew.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11: All Too Easy**

 **(January 1950, August 1946)**

* * *

The usb produced a shrill whistle, the world faded away, turned dark, and then lightened again. A little. And the air felt still, smelled like alcohol, and was chilly.

After their quick success with the Beatles, the next jaunt, back to Wisconsin on a frigid January day, was to prove similarly easy. In fact, Dipper was starting to believe that Blendin had seriously underperformed in covering his tracks.

In other words, he was being lulled into a sense of security. We all know what that means.

Anyway, of all places, Dipper and Mabel found themselves in a dentist's office on a Sunday—the first of January, as far as they could tell from a desk calendar that had not been changed from the last Saturday of 1949. But it felt like Sunday, and it looked like Sunday, either twilight or early morning, hard to tell with the cloud cover and the whistling wind and the tapping snow.

Mabel found a radio, switched it on, and they heard enough of a broadcast to confirm the date. A news announcer wished everyone a happy 1950 but warned that ice and snow were making travel treacherous, though some thawing might come tomorrow, Monday, in time for the back-to-work traffic. The announcer reminded everyone to "Tune in tonight for the Jack Benny Program," and then segued into a program of classical music, which Mabel switched off. "Might as well explore. We must be here for a reason."

"I feel kind of funny about going through the place like a burglar," Dipper said.

"Not me. I'm a creep!"

Well, two could creep as easily as one, so he joined her. None of the interior doors had been locked, and they roamed through the rooms with the locater silent in Dipper's hand while outside the wind howled and snow pelted the place. While Mabel ransacked cabinets of shiny instruments, Dipper settled in at the receptionist's desk with the appointment book and turned on the green-shaded desk lamp.

And on the page for the next day, Monday, January 2, he read an appointment for Senator Joseph McCarthy: EXTRCTN & BRIDGE.

"I think I've found something," Dipper said. He told Mabel about it.

Mabel had decorated her earlobes with a couple of shiny loose molars she had found in a drawer. "A senator? We landed in politics? Again? Man!" she complained.

"No, remember who Joseph McCarthy was. The 1950s? The communist witch hunts?"

One of the teeth fell off her ear, and she retrieved it from the carpeted floor. "You'd think these would make better earrings. Who cares what politics a witch has? This is a free country!"

So Dipper had to remind her of the bizarre climate of the early 1950s, in which someone merely accused was considered guilty, not innocent, where simply knowing someone casually could be construed as a crime, and where because they couldn't send someone to jail for a non-crime that they hadn't committed to begin with, the powers that be—that were, there was that pesky time-talk again—simply made it impossible for them to work or make a living. "The Red Scare, the people terrified of Russia taking over the world. The blacklist and all. That's the movement McCarthy was sort of a big deal in," Dipper finished.

"Huh. Hey, bring the flashy deal back here into the tooth room. It's huge! I call it Tooth Acres. Get it?"

"Got it," Dipper moaned, closing the book, switching off the lamp, and following her.

The room was big—well, very long, very white, tiled walls and floor, and lined with floor-to-ceiling cabinets, the drawers bearing labels like Aa-Ad, Af-Am, An-Av, and Av-Ba. Mable opened a drawer at random (Van-Ve). "See? Look at these!"

"These" was a drawer full of teeth molded in what looked like yellowed plaster, each one with a label attached to a red string that wound around it. Not single teeth, mind—whole mouthfuls of them. "Huh," Dipper said. "These are molds of patients' teeth. This one's for Mrs. Lois Vandergrave, see? Top and bottom. Looks like she was a few molars short of a bite."

"Why do that? Why make a model of the bad mouths?" Mabel asked.

Dipper replaced the molds in the drawer. "I guess so the bridges and dentures and things can be made to fit before the patient arrives to buy them and have them, uh, installed."

"Makes sense."

But they really hit pay dirt in the set of cabinets against the opposite wall. Well, not dirt, really, but teeth, but lots of the teeth were gold, so in that way the analogy holds, see, because pay dirt is sand or silt that has flecks of gold—you know what? Never mind. The locater lit up when they pulled one drawer open.

A bridge—two teeth joined by wires, both teeth gold—lay on a cushion of cotton in a box. Beneath the box Dipper found an envelope, which contained a card. In the shape of an equilateral triangle. And it was yellow, with a blue scrawl that Dipper read aloud. " _Use this bridge for Senator Joe. You'll thank me later_. Uh."

"What's wrong, Brobro?" Mabel asked. "You're all white."

Wordlessly, Dipper passed the note to her. She read the same thing he had just read—but she added the signature: "Bill Cipher!"

"The dentist is following Bill Cipher's orders," Dipper muttered. "No, no, no, this is crazy! But it's possible. I mean, Bill was around in the Mindscape back then, he's trillions of years old—"

"Yeah, he _says_ he is, but you know how he lies," Mabel pointed out. "Might just be billions. Speaking of lying—you know, Dip, these teeth look just like the dentures I tossed into the Bottomless Pit that one time. The ones that got Grunkle Stan in trouble with the law."

"Truth-telling teeth!" Dipper exclaimed, and the locater lit up with a sarcastic flashing red TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH.

"Maybe we should leave them?" Mabel asked. "An honest politician might be a refreshing change."

TAKE THEM, the screen advised. RESULT WILL BE WORSE IF—

The screen ran out of room, blinked off, and then finished—MCCARTHY CANT LIE.

"Huh. Truth works in mysterious ways," Dipper said, gingerly picking up the two gold teeth and dropping them into his pocket.

And that triggered the next jump, to—

* * *

New York, New York, toward midday, where Dipper and Mabel found themselves standing on a corner with the world going completely nuts around them. Taxis honked—well, taxis _always_ honk in New York, but these honked like a flock of crazy and infuriated geese who'd just discovered the lead goose had led them out over the Arctic Ocean instead of to Mexico for the winter and who were now seriously pissed off.

People shrieked and laughed and shouted. Some of them blew party noisemakers. Others played ukuleles or trombones. Nobody was producing a recognizable tune.

The air swirled with multicolored snow.

"Confetti!" Mabel pronounced. She tilted her head back, caught some on her tongue, looked thoughtful, chewed, and swallowed. "Yep. Definitely confetti!"

Jostling them on every side bustled thousands of people, men, women, teens, sailors, soldiers, nurses, professional men, cops, cab drivers, sewer workers—the latter were the only ones who had a little elbow room—so many others. "What's going on?" Mabel yelled over the taxis, the kazoos, the whistles, the rattles, and the hoarse cheers.

"No idea!" Dipper bellowed. "In here!"

The alcove in front of a closed bank was, oddly, the quietest place to stand. Mabel was wearing a purple-and-green plaid knee-length skirt, a long, baggy red sweater over a yellow blouse with a butterfly collar, and saggy white bobby sox with black-and-white Oxford shoes. A fussy red bow, not a headband, decorated her hair, which looked as if it had been permed. "Well," Dipper said, "at least you look sort of like your normal self, anyway. The sweater and all."

"Yeah, but it's thin. I like mine bulky and turtle-necked. Look at you!" She reached up and removed his hat—a white baseball cap, but with no pine tree, and quite shapeless, as if the stiffening had long since washed out of it. "Not quite the same. But you don't look _bad_ , sort of attractive in an old-timey way." She clapped the shapeless cap back on his head.

Dipper was in a blue windbreaker, red shirt ( _Why is it always a red shirt_ , he wondered), a wide brown belt, jeans faded to a blue-gray and rolled up in three-inch cuffs above the ankles. He, too, wore white socks, but with scuffed brown loafers. He shrugged. "Guess we fit in," he said as a group of chattering high-schoolers went past without giving them a second glance. They all wore rolled-up jeans and bobby sox, too. For a few minutes, Dipper and Mabel stared at the pandemonium flowing past out on the street.

One guy sitting on another guy's shoulders waved a newspaper as they waltzed around through the throng. Dipper made out the big black headline: COMPLETE SURRENDER. Mabel tugged his sleeve. "Hey, wanna see a movie?"

She pointed. Across the street was Lowes Grand, and the marquee said that the picture was _A Thousand and One Nights,_ glorious Technicolor, with Cornell Wilde, Ellen Keyes, and Phil Silvers.

"Don't think so!" Dipper said. "But let's go out and see if we can find out what's happening, and when we are."

They had to hold hands to keep together in the jostling crowd. At one point, a sailor suddenly and without warning swooped in, grabbed Mabel and dipped her, planting a big smacking kiss on her lips, before he whooped and danced off into the crowd. "Not bad," Mabel said, running her tongue over her lips. "But now I think I know what rum tastes like!"

Dipper snagged a windblown newspaper page from the pavement and when they got to a relatively calm corner, he opened it. It was just a couple of pages of want ads, but at the top it had the date: Tuesday, August 14, 1945. The paper was tattered and stained as if it had been on the ground for some hours.

"It's V-J Day!" he shouted into Mabel's ear. He told her the date on the paper.

"What kind of day? Isn't that like tomato juice?"

"Not V-8! V-J! End of World War II! The Japanese agreed to surrender today! Or maybe yesterday! There's a time difference!"

"So, is today Tuesday or Wednesday?"

"I don't know!"

They stopped a slender, giggling woman and asked her, but she only laughed and kissed Dipper. "It's Christmas!" she said before going on.

Dipper wiped his mouth.

"Rum?" Mabel guessed.

"Garlic," he said. " _If_ I'm lucky."

Eventually they realized they were in Times Square, and Dipper found a fresh copy of the New York _Times_ that confirmed they had landed in a celebration taking place on Wednesday, August 15. "The surrender agreement won't be signed until September," Dipper started to explain, "but the fighting's stopped and the war's over—"

"Wish I had my grappling hook!" Mabel said as someone bumped into her with a "Whoops! Sorry, girly!"

A guy with a big blocky camera was snapping away, taking photos of revelers, of servicemen, of ordinary citizens whose expressions ranged from delighted to dazed. "It meant so much to these guys," Dipper murmured.

"Here comes the sailor again!" Mabel warned. "Don't let him grab you!"

As the sailor came grinning up, reaching once more for Mabel, she pointed. "I got mine! There's a lonely nurse, though!"

The sailor tacked and changed course, the photographer snapped the kiss—

And the rest is history, as they say. The man with the camera produced an iconic photo that Mabel caused to happen without meaning to. In years to come it became a symbol of American celebration of a hard fight won at last.

That must have been exactly what they were there for, because in a blink, like magic, Dipper and Mabel were out of there.

And back into the featureless nowhere room outside of time. The walls said in their monotone, "The easy part is over."

"No welcome?" Mabel complained. "We're your guests!"

" _Easy_? You have got to be kidding me," said Dipper.

The wall remained calm and said in its monotone, "From here on the difficulties begin. You have been awake for twenty hours subjective time. You must now rest for ten hours. You must absorb nourishment. And then you begin again."

"Have we at least done a good job?" Mabel asked.

A long pause, and then the wall grudgingly said, "We judge you adequate. Empty your pockets now, Dipper Pines. When you awaken, you will receive a receptacle that will contain all and make everything portable—"

"Bag of holding," Dipper said.

"—so you may deliver the items if and when you meet Blen— _what_ did you say?"

"Bag of holding. Like in Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons. A plot device. A bag that you can never fill up."

"Hermione's purse," Mabel said helpfully.

"Mabel's normal sweaters," Dipper added. "Hammerspace."

"All right," the wall grumped. "Yes, like that. It was supposed to be a surprise."

Dipper hadn't finished his explanation: "The pocket in this suit is like that."

"But it is limited. This will serve for the rest of the journey."

"OK. Are we going to be sent to the past to sleep or—"

"No. That is merely a stopgap. You require real rest. Your beds."

From the left wall a bunk grew. Dipper remembered Blendin's dismal apartment—one tiny room, one tiny bunk. This bed obviously operated on the same principle. A similar bunk emerged from the wall at the foot of the first bed.

"The first is Mabel's. The second is Dipper's."

"Does it make a difference?" Dipper asked.

"Mabel prefers a temperature of two and a quarter degrees warmer than Dipper."

"OK, I guess. Uh—no pillow or cover?"

"Lie down."

They discovered that once they lay down, the bed poofed up a pillow-like pad beneath their heads, and a blanket, or blanketoid material anyway, crept up from the foot to cover them. Despite looking as if it were made from tile, the bed felt soft and snug. Really it was quite comfortable.

And all at once, Dipper discovered that his eyes felt as if they had been removed, rolled in fine sand, and reinserted. He yawned so wide that his jaws creaked.

"Well—good night, Sis."

"Zzzzz," Mabel replied.

Feeling oddly nostalgic for the summer they had been twelve, Dipper fell asleep to the rough music of his sister's snores.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12: Depressing**

 **(March 1933)**

* * *

Almost as soon as the twins woke up, the wall said, "Prepare for time shift."

And then came the disorienting dizziness and the quick fade-out and slower fade-in of time travel.

"Yikes!" Mabel said, staring at her brother. "You're some kind of farmer!"

Dipper wore faded overalls—the kind with the bib over the chest and two shoulder straps—what was the old-timey name? Galluses. Two suspenders that fastened onto brass buttons on the overalls bib and kept it up. Under it he wore a worn blue work shirt, long-sleeved, but the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He noticed patches, not very well sewn, on both knees of the overalls, and he took off his headgear, a straw hat, sweat-stained and showing a lot of use. He felt something wadded in the front pocket of the jeans and pulled out what looked like a canvas bag. He opened it and peered inside. A long way down—like five feet, impossible because the bag was less than a foot long—he saw a jumble of things, his findings from their earlier trip. "Bag of holding," he said, replacing it.

"What do I look like?" Mabel asked. "Where's a mirror?"

He looked at her. "Uh, you're wearing, like, a long pink dress with white polka-dots. It, uh, it's not new, Sis. Pretty faded out. It has a rounded collar—butterfly collar? With a darker pink border, and your hair bow is the same material as the dress. You have a shorter hairdo than normal. Wow, my boots and your shoes are really scuffed up."

"I guess we're poor," Mabel said.

"Looks like it. Let's see. I need a dollar." He reached into his pocket, and his pocket supplied—not a paper bill, but a big round silver coin. "Guess we won't starve. But where are we?"

That was a good question. They stood in knee-high dry grass in what seemed to be a roofless room, brick walls on either side, wooden fences at the narrow ends. "I think we're between two buildings," Mabel said. "In a narrow alley?"

"Let's find a way out."

"And breakfast!"

"OK, and breakfast."

At one end, the fence was solid enough to block them. They went down to the other outlet of the alley, passing a mound of ashes—as though someone had built a campfire there a few days earlier—and discovered that some boards in the fence at that end were loose and would swivel. Dipper moved them, Mabel climbed through, and he followed her. "Where is this place?" he asked. They were in a grim, gray urban street, with only boarded-up businesses across from them. "I hear voices," Dipper added.

"Yeah, I think this way," Mabel said, taking the lead. They turned a corner and saw a busier street ahead—some people were moving down there, anyway—and headed in that direction.

"Are you warm enough?" Dipper asked. They were underdressed for the climate—the air was nippy, and they had no coats.

"I'll be OK," Mabel said. "What are those people doing?"

Across the street a crowd had gathered in front of a shop. They were curiously quiet—and dressed no better than Dipper and Mabel, most of them in worn, shabby clothes. Outside a furniture store, a radio set, a big one the size of a small bookcase, stood atop a table and broadcasting in a scratchy, tinny kind of tone: ". . . and Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme court, is congratulating Mr. Roosevelt, now President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can hear the crowd cheering. Now President Roosevelt is preparing to address the microphones, and we will bring you his inaugural address. The crowd is becoming quiet . . . ."

"This is 1932," Dipper said. "No, wait, 1933, I think. Mabel, we're in the Great Depression!"

In a firm, rather high-pitched voice, the new President told the audience the only thing they had to fear was fear itself and assured them that his administration would work to solve the many problems facing the nation—and that the nation would endure as it had always endured.

And not three storefronts away, a straggling line of men, women, and children stood outside a doorway with a sign above it: Free Soup, Bread, and Coffee.

"There's a restaurant!" Mabel said, starting forward.

Dipper grabbed her arm and stopped her. "It's a bread line," he said. "It's just for people that are dead broke. We've got some money. We can't take their food."

"Oh. But, Dipper, there are so many of them—"

"It was a bad time," Dipper said. "Come on."

The inaugural address had ended, and the crowd broke up, the people looking vague and lost as they walked without any obvious destination in mind. Dipper and Mabel joined the drift down the street. A bony, ragged man leaned against a building as if for support. As Dipper and Mabel approached, he said in a weakly pleading voice, "Mister, can you spare a brother a dime? I got my wife and babies to feed, and we ain't eat in two days now."

"Oh," Mabel said again, a single word overflowing with pain.

"Here," Dipper said, handing over the silver dollar. The man took it, stared at it on his palm, and then, to Dipper's embarrassment, seized his hand and kissed it. "That's OK," he said. "Really, it's OK."

"God bless you," the man choked out. He turned and shuffled away, still leaning against the building as if he would fall without the support.

"Is he drunk?" Mabel whispered.

"He's starving, I think," Dipper said. He saw a tear slip down Mabel's cheek.

They came to a place with a trickle of customers going in and coming out, these people a little better dressed than most others they had passed. On the glass window a sign had been painted in gilt letters: HORN & HARDART AUTOMAT.

"I've seen movies with these places in them. We can get some food here," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket. "The whole place is like a giant vending machine!"

They walked in. Small square tables with seats for four filled the floor space. A cashier manned a register just inside the door. Dipper paused, looking at the walls, lined with compartments, like post-office boxes. People were opening them and taking food out. Dipper coughed and said to the cashier, "Excuse me, my sister and I are in from the country and this is the first time we've been inside a restaurant. Uh, how do we do this?"

The cashier, a kindly-looking woman in her fifties, said, "Each menu item costs from five cents to fifty cents. The doors take nickels. Put the right number of nickels in the slot, turn the handle, and open the door and take your food." Quietly, she added, "You do have some money, don't you?"

"Yes, we do," Dipper said. "Thank you."

He told Mabel, "I'm going to take some nickels out of my pocket." His hand came out with a fistful. "OK, we're going to have breakfast, but we can't overdo it. Just get enough, no seconds and no doubling up on anything. We don't want to stand out."

"Could we take some outside to the hungry people?" Mabel whispered.

"We'll do what we can. I don't think they let you take food out, though."

The process was really easy. By now they had realized that breakfast time had passed—it was at least early afternoon—so they settled for pretty basic food, a couple of sandwiches, two pieces of apple pie, and two cups of surprisingly good coffee—at a nickel a cup!

They found a table away from the others and settled in there. "So—where are we?" Mabel asked.

"We'll find out as soon as we get outside." Dipper bit into his sandwich and then gagged.

"What's wrong?" Mabel asked, pounding on his back. "Are you OK?"

Dipper pulled a slip of paper from his mouth. Except it wasn't paper, but some paperoid substance. With writing on it. "This was inside my sandwich," he said.

"Inspected by Number 1313!" Mabel guessed.

"No. I think it's a clue." Dipper passed it to Mabel, who read the strange message:

* * *

771 777 / 7 777 / 771 1711 17 111 111 / 111 1111 17 171 711 / 7111 1 17 7171 1111 / 71111 17777 77711 / 17 7 1711 17 71 7 11 7171 / 111 7 / 1171 11 71 711 / 17 71 777 77 17 1711 7177 171717

* * *

"This isn't a code," she said.

"Finish eating and we'll figure it out."

Mabel dried the damp slip with a napkin. The black ink didn't run. "Yep, this is something all future-y," she said, handing it back.

They ate their sandwiches. They ate their pie. They drank their coffee. And they left the restaurant, leaving behind a twenty-five-cent tip for the busboy.

Outside, they looked for a policeman but didn't see one. They finally walked into a newsstand, where Dipper bought three chocolate bars (ten cents total!) for Mabel and, as he paid for them, he asked the clerk, "Excuse me, sir, but my sister and me walked in from the country and don't know where we are exactly. What is this town?"

"Glass Shard Beach," the man said.

"Thank you."

Outside, they passed more people begging. Dipper gave each one a dollar, astonishing most of them. "Couldn't you give them more?" Mabel asked.

"Not without making people suspicious," Dipper said. "I think a dollar means a lot to them. You could buy a lot of things for a dollar in 1933."

They passed an amusement pier and found it was doing almost no business. At a baseball-toss game, Dipper spent a quarter and managed to win a stuffed toy—a caveman-era Mickey Mouse—for Mabel. She carried it until they passed a family of three, dad, mom, and little girl, begging for gas money. They were dressed like farmers, too. Dipper gave the dad two dollars, and Mabel gave the little girl the stuffed toy and her last candy bar.

"I should feel good," Mabel said as they went on. "The way the little girl's eyes lighted up and all. But I'm just sad."

"Because we're helping a little, but we can't solve their real problems," Dipper said. They found a small park and sat shivering on a bench while Dipper studied the odd message of sevens and ones.

"It's crazy," Mabel said. I mean, what could it say if you substituted letters? AAB AAA and so on? Two numbers aren't _enough_!"

"Could be if they were ones and zeroes," Dipper said. "Binary code, like for computers. But I don't know the ASCII table by heart, and there's no place to look it up in 1933. Still, Blendin wouldn't give us something impossible to solve. Maybe it's not a cipher, but a code."

"Huh? What's the difference?" Mabel asked.

"Well—a cipher substitutes letters or symbols. Like Z stands for A and Y stands for B and so on. Or that number cipher, every number is a letter. But a code uses a symbol or set of symbols to stand for whole words. Like if you used the word _rat_ to mean _enemy_ and trap to mean _arrest_ , "The rat is in the trap" might mean "the enemy is under arrest."

"Huh. That would be hard to solve."

"It could be that a code would be just numbers, like this. Let's say that you and whoever you're communicating with have copies of the same book. A number like 21-220 might tell you to look on page 21 of the book and count to the 220th word. This doesn't look like that, though. This is more like—two numbers, two symbols, not ones and zeroes . . . wait, I think I've got it!"

* * *

An hour later, after a long walk through a labyrinth of streets, they stood on a sidewalk looking across at a two-storied building nestled—nearly wedged—between two taller neighbors. To the left stood a closed Chinese restaurant. To the right a dry-cleaning business was still open for business. And smack in the center—

"Pines Pawns," Mabel read from the awning sign.

Dipper had deciphered the numbers, deciding their message was "Go to Glass Shard Beach 618 Atlantic St find anomaly."

Mabel said, "This is where Grunkle Ford and Grunkle Stan's dad lived. Our great-grandfather, what's his name."

"Filbrick. But he'd be too young to run a business in 1933," Dipper said. "So, it's probably not Filbrick, but—"

A smaller sign on the door told them: Jacob Pines, Prop. They opened the door and went in, a bell above the door jangling. A heavyset man sat on a stool at a counter. He looked a little like their Grunkles—but not that much. And his features didn't match photos they'd seen of Filbrick, either. "What can I do for you?" he asked in a bored way.

"Uh, just, you know—shopping," Dipper said. "Just want to look around."

"Look around, look around," he said. "Only don't expect to buy a gun, you hear what I'm saying?" He held up a finger. "Times are tough, you young punks think 'Knock over a bank, easy street! Well, it don't happen that way, kid! You try that, you end up dead in the street. I don't sell no gun to nobody I don't know."

Mabel screwed up her face as if trying to work through the triple negative. "Are you Mr. Pines?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Marabel Alcatraz," Mabel said. "And this is my brother Stanley. We're farmers. We live on a farm."

"Whoopie for you," Jacob Pines said with no enthusiasm. "Go ahead, look around, lookin's free. You find something you like, we talk business."

Dipper felt acutely conscious of the locater, which he'd concealed in the chest pocket of his overalls. "Just, you know, looking for useful stuff."

"Yeah, yeah, I heard the song and dance." Gruffly, he added, "You kids eatin' all right?"

"Well—" Mabel began.

Dipper cut her off: "We're doing pretty well. Raise a lot of our own food. On the farm. Where we live."

"New Jersey is the Garden State!" Mabel said brightly.

"OK, only I get people in, break your heart, don't wanna admit how hard up they are, sellin' their grandfather's watch so's they can buy a few days of food."

 _And,_ Dipper thought _, you'd offer us a meal if you thought we were desperate._ Their grumpy-seeming great-great-grandfather's genes must have surfaced again in Stanley, the grouchy old guy with a soft gooey center.

Dipper found a compact tool kit, three screwdrivers and a small monkey wrench and a tack hammer. "How much for this?" he asked.

"That? Buck. Worth two-fifty, I'll take a buck, it's been here so long it could grow whiskers."

"Maybe," Dipper said, but he put it back for the time being. He found a guitar, a lot like his first acoustic version, tuned it, and strummed a few bars of "Home on the Range."

"Nice," Jacob Pines said. "Only I don't care so much for this modern music. You want that? Two dollars, it's yours."

"Got one like it," Dipper said.

"Back on the farm," Mabel added. "Where we live. In New Jersey."

"Now, listen, you two kids _really_ got a place to live?" Jacob asked, again in that gruff tone.

"We really do," Dipper said.

Jacob shook his head. "Yeah, lucky you, only watch out the bankers don't foreclose, am I right?"

Dipper nodded. He turned—and felt the locater vibrate. A shelf in front of him held more tools—a sign of true desperation, when a carpenter sold off all his saws, an electrician his wire strippers, men throwing up a hopeless, frail, final barrier against crushing ruin.

But among the jumble, Dipper spied a yellow tape measure.

He touched it and felt the vibrating locater intensify. "I could use this," he said. "How much?"

"That? Fifty cents I was asking. But I gotta tell ya, kid, it don't work right. The tape sticks bad. You can't even pull it out unless maybe you could take the case apart, find what's wrong, maybe fix it, maybe it's busted forever. Me, I got no skills at that. OK, OK, it don't work, so—twenty-five cents?"

"Who pawned it?" Mabel asked.

"I dunno, read me the number, I'll look it up in the book."

"Uh—33-2-14-3."

"This year, February 14th, third customer of the day, let me see." Jacob opened a green-bound ledger and found the right page, then ran his fingers down a column of numbers. "Got it. Benjamin Valentine. Gave him fifteen cents, he was satisfied, didn't bargain, even. Huh. Valentine on Valentine's day. Go figure."

"Do you remember him?" Dipper asked.

"Who remembers?" But Jacob frowned. "Big baby-faced guy, I think. Stammered a lot."

"Not the guy I'm thinking of," Dipper said. "Here you go. Two quarters." He reached into his pocket and handed them over.

"I said a quarter."

"No, you first asked for fifty cents," Dipper said. "It's worth that to me. Fifty cents."

Jacob shrugged. "I should argue? Wait, I'll write the receipt."

He did, and Dipper and Mabel took their purchase outside. "It's a time tape, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "But I think Blendin jammed it somehow. He obviously wanted us to find it, and nobody else—that's why he brought it here, to our family's shop. I'm thinking he really did leave a back door open in case he got stuck in the Old West."

Mabel nodded. "Which he did. He told us in that letter what happened. His own time tape got run over by a train."

"If we were meant to find this," Dipper said, "then it might work—for us. Want to give it a try?"

"I'd really like to get out of this place," Mabel said. "Get somewhere warmer. Somewhen."

Dipper looked thoughtful. "Come on," he said. "Let's make just one stop first."

They retraced their steps to the place where they had listened to the inaugural address. The soup kitchen was still open, with a long line of people slowly entering as others left after a scanty meal eaten while standing at waist-high tables with no chairs. The aroma of some kind of vegetable stew hung heavy in the air. Dipper and Mabel found a woman—a nun—at the door and asked her if they could talk to whoever ran the place. "There are four gentlemen," she said. "A priest, a rabbi, a minister, and a businessman."

"Wouldn't it be funny if they walked into a bar!" Mabel said.

The nun just looked at her.

However, she found one of the men who ran the kitchen—the businessman, Michael Malone—and he saw them in a tiny back office that might once have been a largish broom closet. "Can I help you?" he asked. His blue suit hung on him loosely, as though he'd lost a lot of weight since buying it.

"My sister and me are farmers," Dipper said.

"We live on a farm," Mabel confirmed brightly.

"And we're doing all right ourselves, but we've heard how tough folks have it here in the city."

"Unemployment's so terrible," Mr. Malone said with a sigh. "So many men who want to work, so few jobs to go around."

"It'll get better," Mabel said. "Trust me. I've got a good feeling about it."

"Meanwhile," Dipper said, overriding her, "our farmers' association wants to help you."

Mr. Malone's face lit up. "If you can offer a donation of any vegetables or—"

"Not that so much," Dipper said. "But would a thousand dollars help?"

"A thousand dollars? That would keep us going for a month," Malone said, blinking.

"Here's the thousand dollars we collected," Dipper said. He pulled out ten oversized bills—a hundred dollars each—and handed them over. "We hope things improve for you soon."

"God bless you, son," Malone said. "Who do we owe this to?"

"The Farmers of the Garden State Farmers Association of New Jersey!" Mabel said. "It doesn't spell out anything."

Malone spread the money on his desk. "Well—I can only thank you. You truly don't know how much this means to us." He shook his head. "When I worked on Wall Street, I never expected this. I tell you young folks, these last years have been so hard—I haven't really worked since our brokerage failed, but some friends of mine helped me organize this relief effort, and I'm getting by and getting a whole new appreciation for the kindness of Americans. I hope to see you again."

"If you don't," Dipper said, "just keep doing kind things for strangers." He and Mabel shook hands with Malone and then left.

"Whoosh!" Mabel said when they had left. "Broseph, you're a shiny example."

"Yeah," Dipper agreed reluctantly, "but—I'm doing it out of guilt. We never stop to think of how good we have it, do we?"

"When we get back— _if_ we get back," Mabel said, "I'm gonna try to think of it more often."

They returned to the shabby, nearly abandoned street where they had first showed up, found the loose fence boards, went back into the narrow alley—

"Ready to try it?" Dipper asked.

Mabel linked her arm through his. "Ready. See if it'll work. Onward and backward!"

Dipper pulled the tab on the tape. It came out about an inch or so and stopped. "Here goes nothing," he said, and he pressed the button.

The tape clicked, and the world of the Great Depression went away.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13: Sixty, Count 'Em, Sixty**

 **(September 30, 1927)**

* * *

When Dipper was aware of where he was again, he found himself and Mabel shuffling in a line. "Where are we?" Mabel asked. Of course.

"I . . . don't know. A sports stadium?"

"Hey, I got a ticket!"

Dipper became aware that he, too, held a pasteboard ticket. He glanced at it. "NY Yankees / Washington Senators," he read. "September 30. But what year?" He turned the ticket over and blinked at what was printed there: _Doz'u trh Nanft pouct scgv ir 8fi qabjns!_

"Uh, Mabel, is anything on the back of your ticket?" he asked.

She turned it over. "Huh. It says _bambino._ What's that? Sounds like a dessert!"

He took out his pad and—pencil? _Oh, sure, I get it, a ballpoint might attract attention_ —and hastily copied both the message on the back of his ticket and the word on the back of Mabel's.

They reached a turnstile and an attendant punched both of their tickets and told them to move to the left, enter through—and whatever else was drowned out by the chattering of the crowd. "We're up in the bleachers," Dipper said, studying both tickets. "This way, I think."

"Anyway, we're dressed better this time around," Mabel said. She was wearing a long-sleeved sweater, cranberry red and ivory, and a matching sash belt, plus a skirt with flounces shading from a matching cranberry at the waist through a dark red, a lighter red, a deep pink, and a paler pink, with a fringe at the hem. Her hair was bobbed, too—shorter than Dipper usually wore his.

He wore a blue flat cloth cap, a plum jacket, a white shirt and red tie, a sweater-vest in charcoal gray, and knee britches—yes, knee-length pants—that matched the vest. He wore socks that went up to the—what did you call that kind of trousers? Plus-fours! They blended right in, though he whispered to Mabel, "I think you're supposed to be a flapper."

"What's that?"

"Tell you later!"

They discovered they were in Yankee Stadium and found their seats about midway up the top level in the right-field bleachers, barely inside the foul line. Mabel sat in the aisle seat, Dipper next to her. The seats were filling up—mostly men, but some women and kids, too.

Dipper kept his head down, working at the cipher he had copied. It looked serious—when had Blendin ever ended one of his messages with an exclamation point before? A latecomer settled right behind Mabel. "Great day for the next to last game of the season ain't it?" he asked.

"Sure is!" Mabel said. "What season is it?"

"Baseball season!" Dipper whispered.

The guy behind Mabel—a wiry guy with a lined face, though Dipper thought he was only about forty—asked, "You guys sittin' here hopin' to catch the Babe's sixtieth? That's why I'm here!"

And something chimed in Dipper's mind: Babe Ruth. "The Bambino," fans had called him. The first guy to hit sixty home runs in a season—but when was that season? He couldn't remember.

"That would be great," Mabel said. She elbowed Dipper and mouthed, _What's he talking about?_

"Two homers yesterday!" the guy behind Mabel said. "Fifty-eight and fifty-nine! They say nobody will ever hit sixty, but I'll betcha the Babe can do it!"

"Oh, yeah, that'll be great!" Mabel said.

"Hey, my name's Joe Forner," the guy said. "You guys from around here? You don't sound like it."

"We're visiting from California," Mabel said before Dipper could answer. "I'm Marcy Flapper, and this is my brother Clem."

"Flapper?" the guy asked.

"She's kidding," Dipper said. "My sister is a kidder. Our name's really not Flapper. It's Flax. She's Marcy and I'm Mas—uh, Mace. Mace Flax."

"Like that's any better!" Mabel whispered.

"You kids come in alla way from California? Where in California?" Forney asked.

"San Francisco," Dipper said quickly, before Mabel could mention Piedmont and open the way to more questions.

"Must be nice there. Warm alla time, I bet. I'm a truck driver, live on First Avenue. I oughta be at work today, but I can't pass up a chance like this!"

"I like the way you do the baseball field out here in New York," Mabel confided. "All the stands decorated with red, white, and blue swags and with American flags."

"Game's about to start," Joe said. "Hang onto your hats!"

It mildly surprised Dipper that the game did not begin with the National Anthem. Instead, an umpire yelled, "Play ball!"

The Senators were first at bat. Mabel asked Dipper, "Should I root for the Senators?"

"Don't think that would be smart," Dipper whispered back. "This is New York. Support the Yankees."

"OK, but it seems disloyal. I am a Congressman, after all."

"Shh!"

Dipper kept running the cipher through various permutations. He had a pretty good idea it was a Vigenère—bambino would almost have to be the key word—but he kept getting distracted. The game seesawed back and forth, and by the end of the seventh inning it had leveled into a 2-2 tie.

It was hard for Dipper to concentrate—the fans were screaming and stomping, Mabel was asking him to signal a peanut vendor for a bag, the heavy guy in the seat to his left kept jostling him—but he grimly kept at it. Joe, behind Mabel, was audibly upset. Ruth had come up to the plate twice, but the sixtieth home run had eluded him. Lou Gehrig, another baseball great, was a teammate of Ruth's and seemed to be doing better than Ruth on that day's outing.

The top of the eighth saw the Senators come close to pushing the score ahead, but they failed to carry it off. Then pitcher Tom Zachary took the mound, the Yankees came to bat, and the next-to-last chance for Ruth to make that sixtieth home run was at hand.

But he came later in the batting order. Dipper hardly glanced at the field. He had the sense that he was close—frustratingly close—to solving the cipher. If only there weren't so many distractions.

A Yankee named Mark Koenig made it to third on a triple, but Zachary struck out one man, and then the crowd roared as Ruth came to the plate.

Dipper did look up then. The first pitch to Ruth was a sizzling strike, right across the plate.

Hmm. The eighth inning, and that number did show up in the cipher: 8fi. What if that meant "8th?" Then the word following would just about have to be "inning."

Zachary's second pitch to the Babe was a ball.

And then Dipper saw the word "Mabel" in the cipher, and as if he had put on a pair of magic glasses, he could read the whole thing, he was sure of it!

Zachary pitched to Ruth a third time—Ruth swung with all his power—the bat cracked against the ball so loudly that everyone in the stadium must have heard it—

"I'm gonna catch it with my mouth!" Mabel jumped up—

"No!" Dipper tackled her and pulled her down. The ball hissed overhead, and he heard a _smack!_ Joe, in the seat behind Mabel's, yelled, "I got it! Ow!"

And the crowd went absolutely crazy. Mabel shoved at Dipper. "You ruined it!" she complained.

"Look at him!" Dipper said.

Babe Ruth ran the bases, not hurrying, loping almost regally, almost as though he owned the field.

And in a way, he did on that day.

He tipped his hat. His teammates swarmed him. The scoreboard changed: Washington 2, NY 4.

"Come on!" Dipper said, though he doubted Mabel could hear him over the deafening cheers.

They had to leave the bleachers and stand in a stairwell—the pandemonium was going on and on—until he could talk to her. "Mabel, I'm sorry, but look at Blendin's message."

He showed her the sheet of paper on which he had written the decrypted sentence: "Don't let Mabel catch hr by Ruth 8th inning!"

"Oh," she said. "So—I guess you did good, huh? And I was being silly."

"Were you really going to try to catch that ball in your mouth?" Dipper asked.

"I don't know. Probably not. I'd lose some teeth, I guess. I was just excited."

Joe Forney came down. "Hey, guys! I'm going to the dugout, see if the Babe will sign the ball. Wanna come?"

"Sure," Dipper said.

They tagged along. The Senators didn't mount a return in the top of the ninth, and—to Dipper's surprise, because he'd assumed there'd be some kind of security—they walked right into the dugout with Forney.

"Babe!" he said, holding the ball up. "I caught your homer!" He held up a red right hand. "Nearly busted my fingers, but I got it!"

"Give you five bucks for it!" Ruth said.

"No, sir! But would you sign it for me?"

"Guys!" Ruth yelled. "You wanna sign this ball or what?"

And the whole team signed, even Lou Gehrig. When Forney said, "Nobody will ever top you, Babe," Ruth laughed.

"If somebody does," he said, "it'll be this lug." Gehrig grinned wryly and shrugged.

When Ruth signed, he added the number sixty after his name. "Sixty," he rumbled, sounding pleased. "Count 'em, sixty."

He tossed the ball back to Forney.

It passed right through Mabel.

If anyone was surprised that the two kids who had come into the dugout with Forney just . . . faded away—

Well, it didn't show up in any of the news reports.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14: Closing in**

 **(1916, 1906)**

* * *

"I want to go home," Mabel moaned. "We're still in a war zone!"

They stood on a street filled with rubble. Flames tore into the sky all around, streaming billows of thick black smoke upward. And they could hear screams . . ..

"This isn't World War I any longer," Dipper said. "I don't think it is. This is closer to home."

* * *

They had jumped from New York in the twenties to France in the middle of World War I—Dipper was a hospital orderly again, in a khaki uniform, Mabel a nurse—and too many casualties, wounded men in overwhelming numbers, rolled in from the front.

It was a scene Dipper wished he could unsee. He hauled stretchers until his arms felt leaden. He skidded in pools of spilled blood. Three times the wounded soldier he and another orderly were carrying died right on the stretcher. They rolled the bodies off with little ceremony in the walled courtyard of the shell-pocked chateau that the Army had commandeered as a field hospital.

If anything, Mabel had it worse. She had to hold pads soaked with chloroform to put screaming soldiers under so arms or legs could be amputated. She saw men with shattered faces. One poor soldier—no older than the twins, sixteen, if that—begged her to do something to help ease the pain in his legs. She knew enough French to understand that, but she could offer no comfort or ease.

He no longer had legs.

Dipper found the anomaly on a shelf with bottles of chloroform and Dakin's solution—the smallest bottle, a vial of penicillin, before it had been discovered by Alexander Fleming twelve or thirteen years later—and, both of them exhausted, Mabel and Dipper held the vial between them. The locater device jumped them automatically—it seemed to do that now, as well as dressing them appropriately.

* * *

"Why?" Mabel wailed. They had both blistered their hands digging a woman and her baby—both miraculously alive, though bruised and scraped—from under fallen timbers. It was early in the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906. On some streets of San Francisco, hardly a recognizable house remained. Worst of all were the screams—screams of pain, of terror, of despair, all around them.

Staggering along with the woman, who held her baby to her shoulder and seemed dazed, Dipper and Mabel tried to make their way out of the city—but they didn't know it all that well even in their own era, and the streets no longer resembled streets. The woman couldn't help them.

And then she began to scream and shake. A group of men, volunteer firefighters, heard her and came to their aid, carrying the woman and her child to safety while she screamed "Where's my husband?" over and over.

Aftershocks made the ground tremble and sent bricks and shingles cascading from tipsy buildings. They reached the Bay—impossible for them to orient themselves, no Golden Gate Bridge for reference—but at last they saw boats ferrying people and joined the straggling, stunned line of ragged, soot-blackened, coughing people fleeing to—to anywhere that wasn't here.

They found a place in an overloaded boat that carried them across choppy water to Oakland. The boat owner, dripping with sweat and gaunt with effort, wearily refused pay, turned the boat, and began to row back to the burning city.

 _It's a wonder it was ever rebuilt,_ Dipper thought, staring at the long expanse of flame and smoke, ruin and carnage. San Francisco had been all but obliterated first by the quake and then by the fire.

He and his sister stumbled away from the crowd and finally found refuge in a small park, under a tree. All around them refugees streamed, either in stunned silence or loudly weeping. "Why's Blendin doing this to us?" Mabel moaned. She looked ready to drop.

"I don't know," Dipper said. He bit his lip and thought. "These last two—they're so hard. Not solving a cipher or anything, but—the suffering. I—I think maybe he's discouraging trackers."

"I want to go home," Mabel said again. She hugged him, and he felt tears running down her face. "Oh, Dipper."

He patted her shoulder. "It's OK, Mabel. We're almost there."

She snuffled against his shoulder. "What if—what if the anomaly thing is in—over there? In that?"

"I'll go find it."

Mabel hugged him tighter. "I won't leave you."

A man, his clothes burned and his hair singed, broke off from the group and came over. "You kids all right?"

"We're all right," Dipper said. "Just—you know."

"Your folks safe?"

"They weren't in the city," Dipper said. "We need to get word to them."

"I don't think the telegraph's working yet," the man said. He reached into his pocket for an oversized wallet. "Here, though, I'll write the address of the closest telegraph office on my card. If you need a place to stay, come to the house address. My wife and some other ladies are trying to find shelters."

"You went over to San Francisco—to help?" Mabel asked.

The man nodded, and they could see how red the skin was on his cheek and forehead. He'd been badly burned. "What else can I do? Here you are."

Dipper took the card. He didn't recognize the name on it—Arturo Crimini. The man told them where they might find food and water and then went back to the street, where he swam against the stream, heading down to the waterfront and the ferries.

"What does it say?" Mabel whispered.

Dipper turned the card over and blinked.

This time it wasn't a cipher.

* * *

 _ONE MORE STOP AND THEN THE REAL THING._

 _IF YOU CAN'T STAND MORE AND WORSE HORROR, TEAR THIS CARD IN HALF._

 _IF YOU CAN TAKE IT, BURN THE CARD._

* * *

Dipper showed it to Mabel. "What do you think?" he asked quietly.

Mabel touched it and read the words aloud. "If we tear the card in half, do we go home?"

"I don't know. I guess. But then the Time Baby will never be rescued and history will just—unravel, I suppose."

"I want to tear the card up," Mabel murmured. "I want to do that so bad."

Dipper gripped it.

"Wait!" she said. " I want to tear it up—but we can't, can we?"

"We can," Dipper said. "I think it's our choice."

"You need a match," she said. She reached into his pocket and produced one—a strike-anywhere match.

"I don't think those have been invented yet," Dipper said. "I might be wrong, though."

"Then it's an anomaly." She sighed heavily. "I'll do it. If I start to break down—help me if you can."

"Always, Sis," Dipper said.

Mabel whimpered. "Hold my hand."

He held her left hand, Mabel struck the match with her right, and he put the corner of the card into the flame.

It flared like a flashbulb, momentarily blinding both of them. Mabel gasped.

When their eyes adjusted, they stood on a broad, flat, featureless plain. A dreary wind moaned above them and buffeted them. No rain yet, but the smell of it on that blustery wind. It was night—very dark, except for frequent flashes of lightning.

Tall grasses all around tossed like waves on a stormy sea. No hills in the distance. No visible roads. The wind howled louder and heavy thunder rolled across the prairie like a juggernaut. Mabel clutched his arm, and he felt her shivering.

A nearby bolt of lightning leaped from the sky to the earth, making the whole world tremble—they heard the electric crackle before the thunder hit them with a physical punch that almost knocked them off their feet. A sullen red flame sprang up where the lightning had blasted into a patch of tall, dry grass. It wasn't that far away.

"Are we in hell?" Mabel whispered.

Before Dipper could answer, something shrieked in the night.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15: Tracking the Train**

 **(Abalone, Kansas, July 1883)**

* * *

"Move!" Dipper shoved Mabel—hard—and she stumbled and fell backward, hitting the ground with a loud _oof_! He dived and landed flat on his face right beside her in the tall grass.

And a steam locomotive barreling along at full speed, its whistle screaming, wheels rumbling, roared right through the patch of air where the two had stood not five seconds earlier. "Wah!" Mabel clapped her hands over her ears and, kicking frantically, scuttled on her back, scrambling further from the railroad. They had been standing right beside the tracks—without knowing it—and the train would have smacked them fatally had Mabel's brother not reacted quickly.

As soon as the caboose rattled and clattered past and into the distance, the red and green running lights fading, Dipper asked, "Mabel, are you OK?"

"Yeah, I think so," she said. "But I landed hard, and that hurt! Also, my ears are still rumbling. Ouch! I hit right on my butt!"

"Would've hurt a lot worse if you _hadn't_ landed," he said. "Mabel, I think I know what happened. Do you remember that letter from Blendin that showed up just before we left Gravity Falls the summer we were twelve? A lawyer guy told Stan it had been left in their office for a hundred and thirty years, but the envelope said to deliver it to the Pines Twins at the Mystery Shack in August, 2012. I pasted it into Journal 3, remember?"

Mabel said, "Yeah, I do. It had that real old photo of Blendin with a big walrus mustache with it. But it was in that weird codey thingy—"

"—right, and I didn't crack the cipher for a couple of months, yeah," Dipper agreed. "But by that time, I mean, by the time we could actually read it, Blendin had already showed up on the bus as we were heading back to Piedmont, and we helped him save Time Baby from being disintegrated by Bill, so when I finally got around to figuring out the cipher, I thought it didn't mean anything because he was back. But it really meant he'd swerved off the time line because he was scared, and now he's stuck and we've got to, uh, unswerve him."

"See, this kind of talk is that makes me get impatient with time travel," Mabel said. "But that's what Lolph told us, sort of, so I guess I agree. Help me up."

Dipper got into a kind of crouch and offered her his hand. He hauled as she lurched.

Mabel grunted, pushing herself up and then turning in a tight circle and slapping herself. "I'm covered with grass and dirt. Feels like I'm wearing old-timey jeans and boots," she said. "And maybe a linen shirt or something?"

Dipper stood beside her. "Yeah, I think I'm in about the same kind of outfit. Rough-textured shirt, too, and a bandana around my neck. Boots. No hat, but I think I may be a cowboy."

"Do you have a gun? I want a gun, too!" Mabel said. "Pew! Pew! Take that, you varmint. Is it varmint? That's a funny word, varmint."

Dipper slapped both of his sides. "No six-shooter, sorry. But the important thing is, I think we wound up close to where Blendin landed."

Mabel sounded as if she should have been wearing her skepticles. "Huh? How do you figure that? There's no way to know _where_ we are, let alone _when_. We can't see anything, hardly!"

Dipper picked a few scratchy wisps of prairie grass from his collar. "The letter said that when Blendin was trying to hide out, he came to the Old West and materialized on or near some railroad tracks, remember? And the train rain over—"

"His time tape!" Mabel finished. "Oh, yeah! I do remember. That's how he got stuck. I see—you think this is probably the same railroad. Maybe even the same train!"

"But not the same time," her brother pointed out. "Otherwise, we would've run into Blendin."

"Yeah," Mabel grunted. She heaved an elaborate sigh. "It's never that easy. What do we do now?"

As though answering her, a long roll of thunder grumbled its way across the flat earth. "I think a storm's coming up. We need to find somewhere to shelter. And since there's nothing around but prairie and the railroad, I guess we follow the railroad."

In the flicker of lightning, Mabel stared toward the parallel dark iron tracks. "Which direction?"

"Follow the train," he suggested. "It must be bound for someplace."

"Gah," Mabel said. "We gotta _walk_? After France and San Francisco, I feel like I'm shell-shocked and have PTAS, and now this—"

"Parent-Teacher Association Syndrome?" he asked.

Sounding annoyed, Mabel said, "No, that other thing. PTSD. And I'm so hungry! And tired. And I haven't had anything to eat since World War I!"

"Let's go," Dipper said. "Sooner we find someplace, the sooner you can eat."

Of all the things that crawl, hop, glide, run, roll, or amble on the face of the earth, a train should be the easiest one to follow. No matter the terrain, it always leaves tracks behind it. It's different, though, and much more difficult on a completely overcast night with only intermittent lightning showing you the rails. Fortunately, one advantage of the prairie they were on was that it stretched flat and almost level, and the tracks lay pretty much ruler-straight, steel ribbons binding the horizon behind them with the one straight ahead. Dipper said, "If this is Kansas, it should be a straight shot. I read somewhere than the Eastern border of the state's only four inches taller than the Western one."

"Then if you put a marble on the Eastern border," Mabel said slowly, "it should roll all the way across Kansas. That would be fun!"

The lightning came and went, sometimes intense, sometimes distant flickers. Once they got caught in a quick splatter of rain—not much, only a minute's worth or so, but enough to leave them uncomfortably damp—and more than once when the weather turned worse, as it did in spells, they grimaced and flinched as a nearby lightning bolt shook the world. They slogged on for close to four hours, Mabel beginning to limp. In a worn-out tone, she said, "Is it just my imagination, or is it getting a little lighter?"

"I think it must be close to sunup," Dipper replied. "But it's really cloudy, so it's darker than normal." Now he could make out the ominous, pendulous lobes of storm cloud overhead. He didn't tell Mabel, but their looks worried him. They looked as though they seriously wanted to develop funnel clouds and send tornadoes spinning and dancing across the prairie.

Once they came to a broad, slow river. The railroad crossed it on a trestle, but there was no other bridge and neither twin felt like swimming for it. "We have to walk across the railroad bridge," Dipper told Mabel.

"I can't stand heights." Mabel took a deep breath. The intermittent lightning showed that the river was not all that far below—but the trestle was at least twenty yards across. "I guess we have to do it," she said, gulping hard. When the lightning flashed, you could see the river below the bridge, glimpsed through the gaps between the cross-ties.

"Hold my hand. We'll do it together."

Halfway across, Mabel whspered, "What if a train comes?"

"We jump in the water, I guess."

"Ugh. Can we go faster?"

They couldn't, not much, because they had to be careful about not stepping into a gap, but they picked up the pace a little. Mabel began counting their steps. When she got to forty, they reached the end of the trestle. No train had showed up. "Hope that's the last bridge," she said.

They walked on for another forty monotonous minutes, and the morning continued to lighten, nearly imperceptibly. But by then they could at least make out the dark slashes of the rails against the paler prairie grass.

Finally, finally, Mabel spotted a light far ahead—very dim, yellow, and distant, but a steady light. "Maybe it's a streetlight," she said hopefully.

"Don't think so. It looks like maybe an oil lamp shining through a window."

They came in the gloomy darkness to a sign standing on two posts off to the side of the rails. They could make out the shape, but couldn't see the words. "I need a flashlight," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket. He came up with a short, stubby one, the kind that works on one AA battery. "Have to get rid of this once we use it," he said. "We can't bring modern tech into the Old West." He turned on the beam and shined the beam at the sign.

"Abalone, Kansas," Mabel read aloud. "Pop 3230. What makes it pop?"

"That's short for _population_." He turned off the flashlight, hesitated, and then said, "Take this back to when it came from, please," and dropped it into his pocket. It vanished. "Huh. Didn't know it would do that. Lolph really should have given us an instruction manual."

"Let's go," Mabel said. "Maybe we can get some breakfast in Abalone."

"I'm not sure we read that name right. I think it might be Abilene," Dipper told her. "No, wait, I think that's In Texas. No, no, Kansas, I think. Doesn't matter. We'll find out when we come to the town. Let's go."

About a quarter of a mile farther on, the railroad depot came into view, and, sure enough, the sign on the front of the porch read ABALONE. The station was locked up tight, but a lone oil lantern hung on a tall pole and gave just about enough light to make the sign readable.

"Strange name for a Western town," Dipper said. "I mean, they should raise cows, not seafood."

"I think you're right, Brobro. Smells like cows," Mabel said, sniffing loudly.

"Makes sense. Kansas was a big cattle-raising state back in the nineteenth century."

They heard mooing and lowing before long and soon enough passed an enormous corral where a nervous herd of longhorn cattle stood and milled about in the early morning. The occasional lightning made them skittish, and every time thunder boomed, they broke out with fresh, anxious moos. "Should be a watchman around," Dipper muttered.

But if there was, they didn't find him. Past the corral the dirt street finally led to buildings, about a dozen or fourteen of them, all dark. The town seemed to exist along one street, stores with high, square false fronts. Behind the stores on one side they could glimpse what had to be houses—none of them showing a light. A wooden boardwalk ran the whole length of the block of stores, but the street was unpaved and blotched with dark places—as the lightning showed—that turned out to be horse and cattle droppings.

"I didn't think the old West would be so smelly," Mabel complained. "Where is everybody, anyway?"

"Guess we're too early," Dipper said. They passed a livery stable and then on the outskirts of town, standing all alone by itself on the right side of the street, the Sheriff's Office and attached jail. Finally, they'd come to a building with a light in it. One window showed dim and yellow, a rectangle against the dark loom of the building.

They tried the door and found it unlocked. Inside and near the desk, a man had stretched out on a cot and was snoring. On the littered desk an oil lantern sat, its wick turned low and its flame reddish-yellow. "Hi!" Mabel said. "Good morning!"

The man jerked and looked up. He was fully clothed—well, pants, shirt, and socks—and he rolled on his side, yawning and blinking. "Who're you?" he asked, swinging his legs off the cot and reaching for his boots.

"We're new in town, and we're looking for somebody," Dipper said. "Is there a watchmaker and watch repairman here in town? One guy who does both, I mean?"

"Ben Bland? Fat guy? That who you're lookin' for?"

Dipper thought, _That's a terrible alias._ But then, he thought, _It's exactly the kind of fake name Blendin Blenjamin Blandin would think up._ "That's him," he told the man.

"Yeah, he's in town all right. Temporarily," the man said, yawning and stretching. Then he grinned, very unpleasantly. "You got a watch needs fixing, boy, you better hurry up, is all."

"Why?" Mabel asked.

The man took a pocket watch out of his vest and looked at it, holding it close to the oil lantern on the desk. "'Cause right now it's just turned four in the morning, and in four hours we're gonna take the watch feller out and hang him."


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16: Desperado**

 **(Abalone, Kansas, July 1-5, 1883)**

* * *

" _What?_ " Dipper asked. "You're going to _hang_ him? Why? What's he charged with?"

"Not just charged, tried an' convicted, too. He shot a pore feller in th' back," the man said. "Git. I want to go back to sleep."

"Who are you?" Mabel asked.

"I could ask you the same question, Missy."

"Why don't you then?" Mabel asked.

"I think I will."

Mabel put her hands on her hips. "Yeah? Who are you to think you will?"

"I know who I am! I want to know who you-all are!"

"You first," Dipper said.

The man thrust out his chest. "You see that there star?"

"Um . . . no," Mabel said.

"Not one there," Dipper added.

"It shore is—oh, shoot, I went and took it off afore layin' down 'cause it sticks me in my sleep. Just a minute. It's here on the desk somewheres." He rummaged around and finally came up with a vaguely gold-hued tin star, which he pinned to his chest. "Ouch. Wait a minute." Second try caught the shirt, not the skin. "There! I'm Deputy Sheriff Barney Roscoe, that's who I am! Where was we?"

"Us!" Mabel said. "I'm Clara Belle Houston, of the Houston Houstons! And this is my brother, Deadeye Dan Houston! And, uh, he's a lawyer!"

"That's right," Dipper said. "Wait, what?"

The deputy's voice snapped with scorn: "You ain't no lawyer. You're too blame young to be a lawyer!"

Oh, well, when Mabel played the tune, you danced to it. "Not in Texas I'm not!" Dipper responded hotly. "You ever hear of the, uh, Robert E. Lee School of Law?"

Though he looked moderately reverent at the name of the non-existent law school, Roscoe said, "No."

"There, so how would you know?" Dipper said. "The defense rests!"

Roscoe scratched his head, his lips moving slightly as he tried to work all that out. "Where is this here school o' law, exactly?"

Mabel, full of aggression, shot back: "You ever hear of, uh, Durland, Texas?"

From the expression on Roscoe's face, Dipper could tell the man was about to bluff. Exposure to Stan had taught him a thing or two about that. And sure enough, the deputy said with false confidence, "Durland? Shore! It's right near the banks of the Rio Grande."

"Not even close," Dipper said, his voice dripping with contempt. "All right, I think Mr. Blandi—Bland is going to be my client. Did he have a trial?"

"Uh, sort of," Roscoe said. "The Judge is a long ways off, visitin' his nieces in Cheyenne. So as Deputy and persecuting attorney, I asked Bland if he was guilty or not, and he said he wasn't, and the Justice of the Peace said a guilty man shore would say that, and it was proof enough for him, and he passed the sentence."

"Was there a jury?" Mabel asked. "Did you serve them pug sundaes?"

"No, warn't no need for a jury! Everybody knowed that Shot Gunderson had a feud with Bland, and so when they found Shot's jacket with the hole in the back, they knowed it had to be Bland what done it! That's police work."

"Mr. Bland has a Constitutional right to an attorney," Dipper said. "My sister and I will go and talk to him. Right now."

"Hold on, there, sonny boy. I still ain't shore you're no lawyer. If you're really a lawyer, say something in Latin."

Dipper didn't know Latin, so instead, with the confidence of two years of high-school French under hsi belt, he said, " _Seul un imbécile poserait cette question._ That means if the local authorities don't recognize a prisoner's right to an attorney, they'll all lose their jobs."

The deputy blinked. "Well—seein' as how it's Latin. All right, I'll give you fifteen minutes."

"An hour!" Mabel said.

"I can't stay awake that long!"

"Half an hour, then," Mabel said. "And then you can tell us where we can get some breakfast."

Shuffling and muttering, Roscoe led them through a door to an array of three cells. Only one was occupied, the middle one. A lumpy figure huddled on a wood cot. "Wake up, Bland!" Roscoe yelled, unnecessarily loud. The figure in the cell fell off and onto the floor. Roscoe laughed. "I'm unlockin' your cell. This here's a lawyer from Phillydelphy-aye, or somewheres, come to see you hangs proper."

Roscoe held the door while Mabel and Dipper squeezed past him into the cell.

"Give us a light," Dipper said.

Complaining, Roscoe went back into the office. Blendin Blandin—of course he was the prisoner, asked fearfully, "Who-who-who are you?"

"Don't you recognize us?" Mabel asked. "How could you forget Globnar?"

"Shh!" Dipper warned. Roscoe brought back a candle stuck in its own wax in the middle of a cracked saucer.

Dipper took it, and Mabel said, "I'll wait right outside the bars for you." She squeezed past Roscoe again and leaned casually against the steel bars while he re-locked and shook the door to make sure it was firmly closed.

"I'll be back in half an hour," the deputy warned. "So, git about yore business!" He left them alone.

In the uncertain flicker of the candle, Blendin looked terrible. His brown hair was disheveled and sweat-plastered to his forehead. His bushy walrus mustache—Dipper remembered it from the photo—straggled unkempt and untrimmed, and he had a three-or four-day growth of whiskers. "I-I-I d-don't know you," he stammered. "Who-who-who are you?"

"Dipper and Mabel!" Mabel said, holding onto the bars and peering into the cell. "He's Dipper! I'm me, Mabel!"

Blendin had lost his goggles. He reached for a pair of round spectacles and hooked them over his ears, blinking. "You-you-you both look older!"

"We're not twelve any longer, Blendin," Dipper said. "Look, we were sent back to find you—"

"By my great-great-seventeen-times-great grandson, Lolph!" Mabel said. "Cute widdle Wolphy!"

"Oh, no! No, no, no!" Blendin said, and they couldn't tell whether he was stammering or just terrified. "The TPAES is after m-m-me for set-set-setting up Time Baby's d-disintegration! Th-they'll k-kill me!"

"They won't!" Dipper said. "Get hold of yourself. Listen: You were supposed to come to us right after Weirdmageddon and together you and we were supposed to go to Time Baby and work out a plan that would save him. That's what you have to do now. Let's go!"

"I c-c-can't," Blendin said. "My t-time t-tape—"

"Train hit it, you sent us a letter," Mabel reminded him.

"Oh, y-y-yes, I-I-I remember that! Th-that was th-this p-past January. I-I-I've been in the Old West for t-two years—"

"Lolph gave us this," Dipper said, taking out the sophisticated time-travel disk.

"Uh-oh," Blendin said, leaning away from it. "Th-that's advanced tech! I-I-I'm not c-cleared to u-use that. It's cl-classified! It's f-from the sneventieth century!" Then he added, "Those are al-always s-set up to b-bring the t-traveler back when the j-job's done, anyway, even if the t-traveler's unconscious or d-d-dead. If you were s-sent to find m-me and it hasn't taken us b-back, it's malfunctioning."

Mabel said, "Hand me the magic bag of hold on!"

"Holding," Dipper said, unhooking it from his belt.

"Whatever!" Mabel took the bag from Dipper and rummaged in it. "We collected all the stuff you stashed in time," she said. "Hey—what was the deal with World War I and San Francisco? Those were horrible!"

"Oh, I-I-I w-wanted to d-discourage anybody on m-my t-trail," Blendin said. "We time-travelers n-never get involved wi-with any of that t-traumatic s-stuff. W-well, I do, b-b-but none of the higher-ups will t-touch m-missions like that. I-I-I knew that only you t-two would have the gu-guts to ge-get through it."

"Listen!" Dipper said. "We only have a few minutes!"

"Not necessarily," Mabel said, and grinning, she reached through the bars and handed Blendin the old-fashioned time tape they had picked up.

He didn't look hopeful. As Blendin explained, the problem was that he had deliberately jammed it. "I could f-fix it if I h-had my t-tools," he said. "B-but right n-now, it'll only take you forward or b-back for a muh-maximum of ten years."

Dipper said, "Take us back to just before you were arrested, then!"

"It's h-hard to cut it that cl-close," Blendin said. "B-but I'll t-try."

"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "It won't do any good if we're locked in the cell—"

"Boop!" Mabel pronounced, holding up the deputy's keyring. "I snuck it off his belt." She unlocked the door and opened it slowly, because it had a tendency to creak.

"H-hang onto m-my arm!" Blendin said. Mabel grabbed him, Dipper held onto Mabel—

And in a flash, they were back four days, to the early morning of June 30. Mabel unlocked the cell—it had of course been locked four days earlier, and now someone else was snoring loudly in the last cell on the end—and they tiptoed out. The same deputy—in the exact same clothes—lay asleep on his cot, and they slipped out into the night.

Except for not being stormy, the night was nearly like the one they had come from. Stars spangled the sky this time, though. "C-come with mu-me," Blendin said.

He led them down the silent street to a small shop tucked away between a dry-goods store and a general store. Blendin reached up over the front door, retrieved a key, and unlocked the place. "Shh," he said. "I-I-I'm asleep in the b-b-back r-r-room, the p-past me, I mean, and they s-s-say if a time traveler muh-meets himself, reality implodes."

"Good to know," Dipper said.

"Gimme the bag again, Brobro," Mabel said. She took it and, kicking off her boots, slipped through the inner door into the back room. She came back looking smug. "It's OK now. Past Blendin'll sleep through anything. I snitched some of the chloroform from World War I."

"Why?" Dipper asked.

"Just in case," Mabel said. "Obviously!"

Blendin pulled the shades, lit an oil lamp, and sat at a work bench. He opened a drawer and took out an array of tools. "If I j-j-just had a so-sonic screwdriver, this would b-b-be easy."

"Sonic screwdriver?" Mabel asked. "What the heck is that?"

"It's a u-useful tool," Blendin said. "B-but you have to be a p-p-pretty high-r-ranking time traveler to b-be issued one."

"Can you talk while you work?" Dipper asked.

"S-sure. I've f-fixed these l-lots of times."

"OK, what happened with you and Shot Gunderson, whoever he is?"

With a grunt, Blendin worked away as he explained. His explanation included a lot of stammering, so let's cut to the chase.

Buck "Shot" Gunderson was a shady character, rumored to be a highwayman who often traveled from his small ranch near town to distant points, where he supposedly held up stagecoaches. Anyway, he always came back to town flush with money, from cattle sales, he claimed, though nobody could tell that his small herd ever went anywhere. He was mean and, though he was no quick draw, people were afraid of him.

He didn't take part in showdowns on Main Street at high noon, a gunfighter bent on a duel in the sun with a lawman. However, he did have a suspected habit of slipping up behind people he held a grudge against and shooting them in the back. Over the years that had happened at least three times. He'd never been caught in the act, however. There was only a suspicion.

Anyway, on that same day, the last Saturday in June, Gunderson was going to walk into the shop around ten in the morning and insist that Ben Bland repair a valuable gold watch that his grandfather, on his deathbed, had sold to him, or so Gunderson claimed. He gave Ben exactly an hour to do the job and then went to force the saloon keeper to open shop so he could have a few drinks.

Blendin explained that, once he had opened the watch, he saw the problem was a misaligned cog. That was an easy enough fix, but he was out of the light oil that he needed to lubricate the watch works. Without the oiling, the watch would tick for about five minutes, then stop.

"I-I-I didn't want to m-make him m-mad at m-me," Blendin told Dipper and Mabel. "S-so I u-used the c-closest thing I h-had."

Butter.

"You _buttered_ his watch?" Mabel asked.

"It was the b-b-best butter," he said defensively.

However, even when Gunderson picked up the watch and found it working, he refused to pay unless it ran and kept time for a week.

He was back in two hours. The watch had stopped.

Gunderson roared and threatened and bullied—but three other customers were in the shop to witness his outburst, and one ran to get Sheriff Mark Dilton, who came in and broke it up. "You get back to your ranch," he had warned Gunderson. "And if Mr. Bland gets back-shot, I'll know who to look for."

On the morning of July 2, one of Gunderson's hired hands, Dumb Jimmy Mook, had ridden into town with Gunderson's jacket. He'd gone to the Sheriff's office and explained he had found it out back of the ranch house. It looked as if somebody had dragged a body to the river, he said. There was a bullet hole squarely in the center of the jacket's back, with a little blood around it. Obviously it was a .44-caliber bullet hole.

Dilton was out of town, having left early that morning for Kansas City to make a deposition in a case, so Deputy Roscoe heard him out, then went to the watch shop. Bland insisted he didn't own or carry a sidearm—but when the deputy searched the shop, he found a Colt Dragoon revolver, .44 caliber, with one fired cartridge. It had been clumsily hidden under a pile of bills and receipts.

The Justice of the Peace—who was Gunderson's cousin—convened a jailhouse court, heard the testimony, looked at the jacket, and found Bland guilty, and that was that.

"No body?" Dipper asked.

"N-n-no. Th-they th-thought I'd s-sunk it in the r-river."

"You've been railroaded!" Mabel pronounced.

"I think I see the plot," Dipper said. "You'll be hanged at eight o'clock on July Fourth. Then Gunderson will show up all innocent—he was just out of town on one of his trips—and you'll be gone without him bothering to shoot you, since the Sheriff warned him about that."

"OK," Blendin said, holding up the time tape. "It's f-f-fixed. Where do we g-g0?"

" _When_ do we go?" Mabel corrected. "I vote for home! April 2016, and step on it!"

"Not so fast," Dipper said. "I think we ought to show up Gunderson if he did what we're pretty sure he did. Are you game, Blendin?"

"N-n-n-n-n, oh, I guh-guess so," Blendin said unhappily.

Dipper briefly outlined what amounted to a plan. Mabel said, "I'll take charge of keeping Past Blendin asleep until then!"

"And," Dipper said, "I'll hide when Gunderson comes in. Then all you have to do, Blendin, is the exact same thing you did the first time around."

"I-i-including the b-butter?"

"Especially the butter!" Mabel said. "And if there's any left over—I'll eat it!"

Then all they had to do was wait until ten A.M.

And that was one of the hard parts.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17: Buck "Shot" Gunderson**

 **(Abalone, Kansas, July 1883)**

* * *

With a little time at their disposal, Blendin shaved—"Mustache, too!" Mabel insisted.

"B-b-but I kind of l-like it."

"It's unsanitary," Mabel insisted. "And if you ever want to kiss a girl—"

With a sigh, Blendin lathered up and shaved it all off.

"When can we get some food?" Mabel asked.

Blendin looked at his watch. "The H-Horn Sp-Sp-Spoon should be opening any time now," he said. "It's down the s-street. There's an early-morning t-t-train that stops at the station, and the layover's ab-about half an hour, so they open to f-f-feed the passengers."

"Somebody has to stay here to make sure your past version doesn't wake up," Dipper said. "I'll do it. Mabel, how much chloroform do you use?"

"Just one half-glug on a handkerchief. But don't do it unless Blendin's waking up. And it puts them out fast, so don't overdo it!"

"OK," Dipper said. "Bring me something back." He went into the back room, drew up a chair, and listened to this Blendin peacefully snoring.

* * *

The sky was turning pale, and Mabel and Blendin could see their way down to the restaurant, which was already crowded. They went in, found a table, and a scrawny woman in a long dress and a bonnet came over to the table. "Why, Ben! I like to not've knowed you! You look right different without your soup-strainer!"

"I-I-I know, J-Janey. Uh, Janey, this here is m-my n-niece Mabel. M-Mabel, Missus Janey Choakem ow-owns the Horn Spoon."

"Howdy!" Mabel said. "Let's get down to brass tacks. Where's the menu?"

"The what?" Janey asked. "Oh, the grub? Well, you can have biscuits and eggs and steak, biscuits, steak, and eggs, biscuits, gravy, and steak, steak and biscuits and steak, eggs and ham, eggs and biscuits and ham—"

"Steak and eggs and biscuits!" Mabel said. "And an extra biscuit and hunk of steak! And coffee! You have any plastic dino—no, you wouldn't, forget it. Strong coffee, though!"

Blendin, whose stomach might have been a wee bit touchy on that particular day, asked for just scrambled eggs and a small biscuit. And milk.

The food came in a few minutes. "Woohoo!" Mabel said. "I've hit the mother lode!" The coffee was in a tin mug, pint-sized. The two steaks might together have totaled a pound and a half of meat, and it looked as if half a dozen eggs had been scrambled. All of that came to—

"Thirty cents?" Mabel asked, astounded. Dipper had produced some era-appropriate coins, and she gave Mrs. Choakem fifty cents. Blendin's more modest meal came to only twenty cents, and that, Mrs. Choakem said sorrowfully, was because milk was a little bit scarce this week.

Cowboys sat at the other tables, gobbling and belching. Some of them stared at Mabel when she got down to business with knife and fork, obviously impressed by her take-no-prisoners style. When she had finished, she sat back, gave a satisfied burp—some of the cowpokes applauded—and grinned. "Now for Dipper," she said.

The biscuits were amazing. Blendin said they were cat's-heads, but assured Mabel they didn't have any actual cat in them. They were almost the size of a coffee saucer, fluffy and tasty. Mabel slit one of these open and stuffed it with leftover steak, making a sandwich.

A cowboy at the next table said, "Missy, that's a interestin' way to eat a steak!"

"It's for my brother," Mabel explained. "It's take-out."

"What?"

"Take-out. I'm gonna take it out to him. Some day restaurants all over will be offering this kind of food."

"Sh-sh-sh!" Blendin said, stirring uncomfortably.

The cowboy laughed. "You know what? I think I'm a-gonna try that. Take one with me for the train. It's a long, hungry ride from here to Weskin!"

"Go for it!" Mabel said. "Anybody asks, tell 'em Miss Mabel recommends it!"

"Thankee, Mabel. Oh, my name's Macdonald, by the way. Proud to've met you."

The restaurant owner sold Mabel one of the tin cups and filled it with coffee and added a splash of milk, and then Mabel and Blendin headed back to the watch shop. They got there a little after nine. Mabel handed over Dipper's breakfast, paused, and muttered, "Macdonald, did he say? I wonder—no, couldn't be."

* * *

Shot Gunderson showed up right around ten A.M. Mabel was in the back room again, making sure that the past version of Blendin slept peacefully on. Dipper hid himself behind the desk, and Blendin sat at the work table.

Gunderson turned out to be a medium-tall man, brawny, with a broad chest and big arms—and a pistol hanging in a holster. His face was wide, red, and ugly, with a scruff of gray beard, bristly brown hair streaked with more gray, heavy bush eyebrows above mean little dark eyes, a broken nose, and a mouth that showed gappy yellow teeth when he talked.

His voice was harsh and angry from the start: "This here's my, uh, grandpappy's watch. It's stopped a-running. I want you to fix it fer me. I'll give you an hour. How much?"

"If-if it's just a cl-cleaning, twenty-five cents," Blendin said. "If I have to r-replace parts, could run half a dollar or six bits, depending."

"Don't go over the six bits," the man warned, and he left the watch and swaggered out.

Dipper came out from hiding as Blendin started to work. "This d-didn't b-belong to any grandpa," he muttered. "It's not b-but six y-years old. He s-stole it from some p-passenger on one of his stagecoach hold-ups."

"I could go back a few days and bring you some of your watch oil," Dipper suggested.

"N-no, I've d-done this kind of thing b-before. It's b-best to stick to what happened as close as possible."

What happened was a replay. Blendin repaired the pocket watch, lubricated it with a smidge of butter, and a growling Gunderson picked it up, then returned in a fury. By then Dipper and Mabel were both hiding in the back room, eavesdropping. Three other customers had come into the shop, one buying a watch, one having one repaired, the other looking for a watch chain. When Gunderson roared that he would pound Blendin into a paste, one of them ran off and returned with the sheriff, a big man with a booming voice, and he sent Gunderson away with the warning.

A few minutes after that, the sleeping version of Blendin started to stir. Wary of overdoing the chloroform, the other Blendin—the one now without the mustache—and Dipper and Mabel slipped out the side door.

What happened next got a little bit intricate. They used the time tape to relocate themselves to late the next evening. Blendin led them on a long walk—five miles, easy—out into the countryside to a ramshackle ranch house. "Th-this is G-Gunderson's pl-place," Blendin said.

They spent an uncomfortable night hunched just out of sight of the house, two drowsing while the third kept watch. Then the next morning, with everyone uncomfortable, they heard Gunderson's growling voice: "You know what to do?"

"Yeah, boss," another voice said.

Blendin whispered, "Th-that's Jimmy M-Mook. He's the one who buh-brought the jacket in and said I'd—"

"Be sure you put some blood round the hole," Gunderson said. "Shoot one of them dang prairie dogs or a rat or somethin'. Then when they arrest the fat fool, you slip into the watch shop and leave the gun. Use that old Navy Colt from the war—it ain't no good at any distance nohow. You remember all that, now."

"I will. Where you gonna be?"

Gunderson gave a phlegmy chuckle. "Gonna ride over to Coldwater. The stage is s'posed to be carryin' payroll money for the bank tomorrow. I'll be back 'round sunset on the fourth, so make sure Fatty's hung on Independence Day morning."

"I'll take care of it."

The listeners hunkered down as someone rode off on a horse. A few minutes later, they flinched when a gunshot exploded not far away. And then after the second man, Mook, rode off, too, they came out of hiding.

"We gotta stop him!" Mabel said.

"No. We've got to make sure they get _caught_ ," Dipper said. "Come on. We have a train to catch."

That was touchy. The three of them lounged around in the alley across the street from Bland's Watch Shop until a deputy came and took the protesting and baffled past Blendin away. Dipper used the time-travel disk—over Blendin's objections—to disguise the three of them, Mabel as a red-headed flirtatious belle, himself as a bearded cowpoke, and Blendin as—well, as Mabel's Aunt Gertrude, in a gingham dress and bonnet.

They caught the afternoon train, rode it as far as the next settlement—Buzzard's Roost—and Dipper went straight to the telegraph office. He showed the telegraph operator a document (materialized by his pocket) affirming that he was an inspector for the Overland Stage Company and sent telegrams to the stage office in Coldwater and to Sheriff Dilton in Kansas City.

The first one read:

HAVE SOLID INFORMATION THAT COLDWATER STAGE WILL BE HELD UP ON JULY 3 STOP SUGGEST EXTRA GUARDS HIDE INSIDE STAGE POSING AS PASSENGERS STOP EXPECT ONE BANDIT STOP HE IS WANTED IN ABALONE CALL IN SHERIFF DILTON FROM THERE REACH HIM IN KANSAS CITY C O COURTHOUSE STOP SIGNED DANIEL HOUSTON ESQ ATTY AT LAW.

The second, addressed to Sheriff Mark Dilton, care of the Kansas City Courthouse, read:

URGENT YOUR DEPUTY SET TO HANG INNOCENT MAN MORNING JULY 4 STOP GET BACK TO ABALONE BEFORE 8 AM TO PREVENT STOP FALSE MURDER CASE SET UP BY BUCK GUNDERSON STOP EXPECT HEAR FROM COLDWATER STAGE COMPANY SOON REGARDING GUNDERSONS ARREST STOP ALSO INVOLVED HIS HIRED MAN MOOK AND COUSIN WHO IS JUSTICE OF PEACE MAYBE YOUR DEPUTY TOO STOP SIGNED DANIEL HOUSTON, ESQ ATTY AT LAW.

* * *

"Now what?" Mabel asked.

"Now we go back to the jail on the morning of July 4th and see if any of this works." He took out the disk. "Blendin, this can transport us straight there. We don't have to take a train back or anything."

"I-I-I'm going to disappear," Blendin warned.

"What?" Dipper asked.

"W-w-well, I c-came to this time p-period differently f-from you. When we get b-back to about f-four-th-thirty in the morning on July 4, I'll just b-blend in with that o-other m-me. It d-doesn't h-hurt, and I-I should have b-both s-sets of m-memories, b-but I m-may get my m-mustache b-back."

"Always complications," Dipper sighed.

"Brobo," Mabel said, "I think we might have to reconsider things. Just in case the sheriff is late or something. We can't go into this thing unarmed."

"We could stage a jailbreak," Dipper said. "I don't like the idea of toting guns, though."

"Pssh! Leave that to me. Mabel!"

It took a bit of doing, but, hey, it was coming up on the Fourth of July, a Wednesday, and they had a day to play with.

And a bag that held, like, anything.

And everything.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18: Showdown at the Abalone Corral**

 **(Abalone, Kansas, July 4, 1883)**

* * *

OK, technically it wasn't a corral.

But the device transported them back to a few seconds after they had first set out from the stormy morning of July 4. They barely had time to get into the cell before Blendin's mustache sprouted all at once, like a Chia pet on Benzedrine.

"W-whoa," he said, clapping his hands to his head. "Th-this is w-worse than déjà vu! Man, did that chloroform g-give me a headache!"

"You remember both time lines?" Dipper asked.

"Y-yes. Th-that's how it w-works."

"Mabel, lock us in and then take the key back to the deputy."

"Aye, aye, sir!" Mabel said. She did part of that—but when she looked into the office, she saw the deputy stirring and instead of trying to hook the keys back on his belt, she tossed them so they jangled to the floor beside the cot.

A couple of minutes later, Deputy Roscoe came stamping in. "Time's up," he said.

"I'm wiring to the Governor for a stay of execution," Dipper warned.

"You do that, Mr. Houston."

The deputy shoved them out. It was close to five A.M. They walked to the depot—also the telegraph office—and Dipper, after asking who the Governor was—"Just came in from Texas," he explained to the station master—dispatched a telegram to Governor George Glick, briefly asking for a stay of execution for Ben Bland of Abalone, citing irregularities.

The station master transmitted it, but warned Dipper, "There ain't time for him to do this. Your friend's a-gonna be hung. Too bad. I liked him."

Dipper and Mabel took up positions on the boardwalk outside a saloon, diagonally across from the jail. The wind howled, and the dark clouds rolled over, rumbling with thunder. At six o'clock some workmen began putting up a gallows—evidently one they had erected and taken down many times, because it was set up within an hour.

People began to gather almost as soon as it was up. They didn't seem to be in a celebratory mood—they were muttering in a dissatisfied way. The wind twitched the women's dresses and threatened to snatch off the men's hats.

"Where's the Sheriff?" Mabel asked.

"I don't know. I hope he got the telegram," Dipper said.

"Me, too. I wonder what happened—"

A man in a black suit drove a buggy in and tied the horse outside the jail. "Looks like a preacher," Dipper said. "I guess they're going to go through with it."

"Not if we can help it."

Fifteen minutes before eight, the jail opened and the deputy brought Blendin out. The minister was speaking to him. They helped him up the stairs onto the gallows. The deputy said, "We're here to hang this man fer th' cussed back-shootin' of Buck Gunderson. You got any last words, Bland?"

"I-I-I didn't d-do it!" Blendin said.

"Too close," Dipper said. "Plan B!"

As Mabel reached into their bag of tricks, he yelled out, "Scatter! They got guns! Duck!"

And Mabel started lighting firecrackers.

It sounded like the front during World War I. The crowd screamed and ran for it. One or two men fired wildly at the tops of the buildings. The deputy cowered behind Blendin and dragged him back inside the jail. Dipper and Mabel ran across the street and hurled themselves through the jail door before Roscoe could lock it. "Hold up!" Dipper said. "You can't hang this man! I've got a writ of Habeas Corpus!"

He pulled it from his pocket.

"Where them gunmen at?" Roscoe asked.

"I think they rode out of town," Mabel said. "You should get a posse and go round 'em up!"

"Lock Mr. Bland in his cell and go take care of it," Dipper said. "You can't hang him."

But Roscoe snatched the paper (which was a beautifully engraved period writ of Habeas Corpus) from Dipper's grip and ripped it in two. "They's men out there can round up the shooters," he said. "I'm a-gonna hang my prisoner, or my name ain't—"

"Roscoe!" It was the booming voice of the Sheriff. He had come in through the back door.

"Sheriff!" the deputy said. "Listen, we got a hell of a lot of—"

"Are you about to hang Mr. Bland for shooting Buck Gunderson in the back?"

"Yeah, we got him dead to rights—"

"And nothing can stop you?"

"Naw, sir, you know me—"

"I'm starting to." The Sheriff looked over his shoulder. "Bring him in!"

Two strong-looking men hustled in a third, held between them. He had seen better days. He had two black eyes and was, perhaps, missing a couple more teeth.

But he was, indisputably, alive.

And he was Shot Gunderson.

* * *

The story of how the stage company had surprised a would-be bandit, how the Sheriff had ridden hard to get back to Abalone in time, how Mr. Bland had been cleared of all charges, and how not only Gunderson but Mook, the Justice of the Peace, and, yes, Deputy Barney Roscoe were all now under arrest—they spread as fast as Fourth of July fireworks.

The stormy weather blew on out before noon—though word was coming in that a twister had struck not too far from town, doing considerable damage. The Gale place, they said, had blown clean away and though the old couple had hunkered safe in the storm cellar, the little girl was still missing. And her little dog, too.

That afternoon, Blendin and the Sheriff appeared before a real lawyer. Who seemed puzzled. "You are selling off your store, lock, stock, and barrel?"

"T-to the best offer," Blendin said. "The S-Sheriff will take care of the de-de-details. I'm transferring ownership to him. And he's going to d-d-donate the pro-proceeds to the county orphanage. I reckon I have to be moving along."

He met Mabel and Dipper back in the watch shop, left the key on the desk, and Dipper operated the time-travel disk for next to the last time.

* * *

"Aww! We were so cute! And Waddles was so petite!" Mabel said as they watched their newly thirteen-year-old selves board the Speedy Beaver bus for Piedmont.

"OK," Dipper said to Blendin. "You have to put the bus in a time-stasis bubble when it's right between the Interstate sign for leaving Oregon and the one for entering California. Ask the kids—us—for help. And take it from there!"

"Make sure you get the right bus!" Mabel said. "The driver's Mr. Maclachlan, remember!"

"And shave off that mustache again!" Wendy said. "Because we'd remember seeing it, and we don't."

"I-I-I've got my time-razor," Blendin said. "I-I-I'll shave it b-before I s-stop the b-bus. W-w-we can r-really s-save Time Baby? TPAES will f-forgive me?"

"Yes! And you'll get a promotion!" Mabel promised.

"Drop us off in 2016, and then—well, you know what to do!"

"Th-thanks," Blendin said. "M-maybe I'll s-see you again s-some time."

"I can practically guarantee it!" Mabel said.

* * *

They blinked into Helen Wheels, in the parking lot of the high school. Blendin glanced at Lolph. "H-Hi," he said. "I-I-I got it covered."

"Go," Lolph said, and Blendin blinked out of existence and, no doubt, back into it on a September day in 2012, partway between Oregon and California.

A moment later, Lolph's wrist buzzed. Someone said, "Time Baby's back. Success."

"I'll have to collect everything from you," Lolph said. They handed over everything—all of it in the bag, anyway—and Lolph said, "Ordinarily this would be worth a time-wish. But I'm not authorized to give them, so—you each get a do-over if something terrible happens." He gave them each what looked like a shiny brass coin, a little smaller than a penny.

"How does it work?" Mabel asked.

"Just pinch it and say 'Do over,'" Lolph said. "It'll take you back one hour so you can avoid any catastrophe. And don't worry if you have to use it. The TPAES will clean up any messes. It's our job."

"Thanks," Mabel said.

"You're welcome," he said. "And thank _you_ , Gam-gam."

And then he was gone.

Dipper drew a deep breath. "That was all—kinda pointless."

"Well, only because we succeeded. Again. Man, Time Baby really owes us!"

"What next?"

She punched his shoulder. "Next we go home, we get ready to go to Gravity Falls, and then you get to take Wendy to her prom!" she said.

"That'll be a nice change," Dipper admitted.

"You did good, Brobro," Mabel told him with a grin. "Don't screw it up this weekend, OK?"

"Try my best. And Sis, you saved our butts a couple of times. Thank you, too."

"Aww—don't get mushy on me Broseph. Onward!"

And she even let him drive their car home.

* * *

 _The End_

 _Author's note: Next in my GF time line is a story already on the site, "Dancing Queen." However, following the example of J.K. Rowling, I have taken the liberty of slightly rewriting "Dancing Queen" to take the events of this story into account._

 _Of course, for what happened before, after Blendin stopped the bus in 2012, you have to go back to "Time Baby," one of my first GF stories. Time travel is like that._

 _We're going on a short vacation, so—later, everybody!_


End file.
